I had to buy a new laptop this week. Yay! Right?
Well no, actually.
I sat down after work on Thursday evening, and picked up the laptop to do some very important social media stalking emails. I opened the screen, pressed the ‘on’ button, and waited for the familiar Windows login screen. Minutes passed, I became twitchy, then this happened:
*insert profanity of choice here*
That’s right folks, my laptop was dead. DEAD! After swearing under my breath, shouting down the phone at the husband (sorry, love), and generally going into a bit of a free fall tizzy, it occurred to me that we hadn’t backed up any of our photographs.
Oh. My. God.
Five years worth of photos of my children, family, experiences, memories. Over 10,000 photographs, wiped out. Gone. Disappeared into the ether. I could weep big fat tears. If I’m honest, I feel just a little bit heart-broken.
I’m a berk. With knobs on.
I mean, what kind of idiot doesn’t back up their photos?
We’ve had the hard drive looked at, and initially nothing could be recovered. It’s been sent of for specialist recovery, and I’m hoping, with every last ounce of optimism I can conjure up, that they can work some magic. Otherwise, I’ve wiped out the photographic memories of my children’s childhoods, thus far, in one fell swoop.
We had one small reprieve this evening, in that we discovered I’d not wiped the memory card on our ‘best’ camera, so I have around 2,500 photographs on there. Plus the lower quality ones on my phone. I just can’t believe my utter stupidity.
So, if you know me, and have any photographs of my family, I’d be eternally grateful if you could email me them.
If you’ve got more sense than me, tell me, other than an external hard drive (which we’ve now bought), where is the best place online, to store photographs, in their thousands?
Let this be a stark warning to anyone else out there who hasn’t backed up their photographs. You may well live to regret it. I know I do….
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Oh, I feel for you – it’s so easily done.
If you bought a decent hard drive it will come with a feature to automatically back up your systems wirelessly at defined intervals, or continuously, so you don’t have to remember to do it. The Toshiba Touro range also include cloud back-up in the price, so while it’s automatically backing up to the external drive, it’s also backing up to an online storage on Toshiba’s servers, which you can access from any computer.
You can back-up photos to Flickr, but it’s a pain to download them back in batches if you need to, so a cloud back-up really is the better option. If your hard drive doesn’t include this service, your ISP may well do – both BT and Virgin have online vault services that will automatically back up either selected files or your entire computer whenever you’re connected to the Net.
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Thanks Sally!
I think the external hard drive we bought is WiFi, so that’s one thing at least. Not sure what brand though, as the husband bought it while I was at work, and now the recovery people have it. As for Flickr, you’d think I’d've used that by now, but no! I have an account, but never use it. Must remedy that…
We’ve also decided to actually have some photos printed every month. Flicking through albums is something I love doing, so why I don’t do this already, I’ll never know.
We’ve just signed up to iCloud but you’d need to speak to my tech geek hubby. We’ve got ours on an external hard drive too! Hugs to you and hope they can be recovered x
Thanks Kara, I have everything crossed that the specialist folk can recover our stuff!
I back up everything to Flickr. I had my laptop stolen when I first moved to the UK and didn’t learn my lesson. I took my laptop to be repaired and I told the person I didn’t have anything backed up. He then proceeded wipe my hard drive clean and reinstall everything. After wanting to cut off his… I started to dumping it all onto Flickr. I’m also slowly uploading it all onto iCloud and I also burn them to CD’s. I’m also pretty anal about printing my favourites. Over the top?
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Not over the top at all! We’ll also be burning discs, storing externally, on the web, and printing favourites!
I use smugmug – they have a “download all” feature for each album, which makes it easy to get them back!
oh poor you – this happened to me as well…lost 2 years worth of memories………I now have a virtual back up thingy called livedrive…it backs everything up and is unlimited….very easy to use as well
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Is the LiveDrive thing the Windows Live one?
I think I noticed this on the nee laptop, when I click to edit photos….
Hi Ellie
I do feel for you. You need DropBox. It’s free for up to 2Gb and if you use this link http://db.tt/cN8t3s1 we both get a bit more space.
Best thing about it is that it is seamless. When you install DropBox, it asks you where you want to put the folder. Then anything that is put into the folder is instantly synced to the cloud. You can have DropBox on as many different computers as you need and keep them all in sync.
So for instance, it is installed on my MacBook, my work PC, my wife’s laptop and my Ellie’s laptop. You can set which folders sync to each machine, so we share our ten years worth of photos between us. As soon as I add some more, they are shortly available on each machine.
Did I mention it is free?! I actually pay for the 50Gb version because it is so superb I’d be lost without it. Highly recommended.
Thanks Pete. I did wonder about Dropbox, and think I actually signed up via my iPhone ages ago.
Can’t believe that I kept putting off something that now seems so important!
Oh no! I remember when my imac died suddenly, it was the photos I lost that I was most gutted about. I try to back up on my external hard drive but then I worry if something happens to that… I might try icloud or something similar. Hope your computer people can work their magic and retrieve something for you
Thanks lovely. I have everything crossed!
I learnt the hard way too, thankfully we managed to recover some of the photo’s. I now have a hard drive but it isnt wireless
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