Lesson Learned

I briefly mentioned this in a previous post.  Justin and I thought we had this great idea (and it was) to have a media drive that basically synced our computers together without the networking headaches.  We save pretty much everything on the media drive, not on our computers.  Great idea right?  Computer's crash, and you lose information.  By not saving anything on our computers we could bypass all of those problems.

I did bring up the point that maybe we should make a few backup dvd's with the pictures and our businesses financials -you know, just in case.  Well, that takes a lot of time, and a bit of planning, something that both of us sometimes lack in.

Right before Christmas Justin told me he thought the media drive.  I didn't want to think about it.  I couldn't think about it, just the thought of thinking about it brought tears to my eyes.  Every single pictures I've ever taken digitally or scanned was on the drive.  Wedding pictures (which thankfully can be recovered, along with the last family pictures and the other professional ones taken by Terra at Magnifique) every picture of my kids, vacations, you get the idea.  It just makes me sick.  Justin not only has personal files on the drive, but also work stuff, including all the financials from 5 or 6 businesses.  We won't be able to do our taxes without it.

So, he sent it off to IOMEGA (after getting an estimate of $200 -$1,000) to recover our files.  This week we got the written estimate.  $1,800!  I can't believe it.  We are lucky and blessed that we can pay that.  And, in 5 years I would absolutely regret not paying the money to recover our family pictures.  That's obviously the most important thing to me, but as I mentioned, Justin is going to find his life getting very difficult and spending countless hours trying to recreate a lot of business paperwork.  Here's the worst part.  We still don't know if any or the files even CAN be recovered.  The estimate states that $1,800 is the price regardless of how much is recovered.  If they aren't able to recover ALL of the files, we can choose to accept the repair as is (for the full price) or not anything.

So, let's hope that our files can all be recovered and we've learned our lesson.  We are both already transferring the few files on our computers to dropbox.com .  It seems like a great service and we'll be able to access everything from anywhere -it even has an app.