Preschool Photo 2010

Lilly wanted to share her preschool photo with you that was taken at school...so cute!

Here she is, age 4...

Tough Lesson to Learn

Question: Who thinks data is safe in an external hard drive?

Answer: It's not! ... at least not when your external hard drive is dropped on the floor.

Yes, it was a tough, and expensive, lesson to learn at the Z house. Almost 4 years of photos and video were stored on my external hard drive- a safe place, or so I thought. My little red drive housed all of the precious images of my two little children; and in my ignorance, I thought they were safe. But one day a certain husband dropped the hard drive on the kitchen tile. End result- a broken drive- internally broken so it could not even be recognized by my laptop.

Panic stricken and ready to take out vengeance on a certain husband, I called a local data recovery specialist. After about two weeks, increased blood pressure, contemplation of revenge (or divorce), and many heart wrenching thoughts of never again seeing all of my thousands of photos of my girls, the data guy saved the day. He was able to recover the data from the scratched drive... all of the data... all of the photos... all of the video. Hallelujah! Did I mention it cost a small fortune?

In any case, I am now a subscriber to Carbonite, an online data backup company. Carbonite automatically backs up my computer every time I have an Internet connection for about $50 a year- unlimited data. And, I also have a new system of backing up items to my laptop hard drive and new external drive.

So, for all of you out there reading this post, let this be a lesson for you also. Don't put all of your eggs in one basket. And, don't store all of your data in one location (meaning one house, etc.) What would happen if your house burned to the ground? External hard drives are not meant to withstand impact in any form. Thank you data recovery man for saving my marriage and my sanity! :)