Crashed Hard Drives and Lost Photographs

The past two months have been a terrible time for computers in my house. In December, a neighbor girl came over to watch our house while we were gone. She asked if it was alright if she used the computer (home schooler) to work on something. When I got home, my hard drive was FRIED! I had to spend a couple hundred bucks getting a new one and was not able to save any of the data...that meant lost pictures, lost documents, etc.

After Christmas, I went out and bought an external hard drive that I was going to use to back up everything on my Dell. I was in the process of doing so, but unfortunately had some things I was working on for work on the external hard drive that wasn't on my Dell. Well...Murphy's Law happened! The new external drive is FRIED! And I lost everything on it! Most importantly, the stuff for work which is due at the end of March. I will have to start all over.

The good news in this, I went out to the garage and pulled down my old Compaq out of the rafters. Since I've had the day off today (MLK) I decided to set it up in my office with my other computer. The cool thing is it has an iomega Zip drive and I've found a BUNCH of old photographs I thought I had lost! Hopefully, with the ZIP drive and a couple of jumpdrives, I can periodically run some backups to insure 2008 is a better year for data in my house!

The photo I've attached is a collage I put together for my father. The photographs were taken at the Hot Rod Nationals in Indianapolis in 1999. My oldest son, who will be 17 this summer is pictured enjoying the show.