alot can happen in a week!

I've been a terrible blogger and to my faithful readers - I apologize.

Alot can happen in a week. . . . .

We completely renovated our bedroom.
I lost months and months of images on my backup external hard drive.
I met Rachel Ray.
We tore out the carpet in the bathroom and are now in the process of renovating that room.
I'm setting up GREAT website.
Did I mention I lost MONTHS of images on my backup external hard drive? :-(

Where do I begin?

Let's start with the lost hard drive.

I've been using my Hubby's Powerbook to process images - MACs are just better all around for image processing. The processor is more powerful and faster which makes for happy photographers. Anyway, lately the Powerbook's storage is bursting at the seams. Normally, I'll backup to a CD but I hate having all those CDs lying around.

Hindsight is 20/20 and I learned a VERY hard lesson.

For my birthday, my mother-in-law bought an ultra cool 160GB external hard drive. I thought, "Great! No more CDs!" My friends use external hard drives as back-up and I've seen other photographers do the same thing.

I was so excited! The hard drive was setup and we backed up my images to it. Everything was great. We were able to connect it to both the PC and MAC without any problems and it seemed to be running great until. . . . . . . . . . .

My hubby tripped on the hard drive's power plug while it was hooked up to the MAC. It happened in slow motion. Hubby was putting up the laundry and I was editing Hayley's images. He tripped over the cord which caused the hard drive to go air born and land with a resounding 'Bang!' on the floor.

We were both speechless and just looked at each other.

Since then, we have tried everything - from sending it over to the resident family computer person/geek/nerd (don't we all have one? :-P ) to wrapping it in foil and placing it in the freezer for a few hours. (one of my hubby's fellow labrats told him to try this) No matter what we do - the computers are NOT recognizing the drive and it's making a loud grinding noise - which we've found out is BAD.

I couldn't get too mad at my Hubby because he feels AWFUL about this and has spent many a sleepless night trying to fix the problem. In my darker moments, I've spent the time trying not to cry.

We've called several data recovery centers and right now cannot justify spending between $1600 - $5000 to have the data recovered.

Because of this, I have learned a BIG, BIG, BIG lesson.

Backup EVERYTHING to a DVD.

The list of galleries on the right were created prior to my crash and the image files are low-res.

I do have the CD backup from several jobs - but alot of my most recent work - stuff I was going to build my website around is - portfolio building images - are gone.

*sigh* It makes me sad just writing about it.

more about the renovations and Rachel Ray tomorrow.