lesson learned.

You know all of those scrapbook pages that I spend hours on and post here occasionally? Well, as of 9:00 am this morning I thought they were all lost forever. You see, I save all of my pages and digital kits on my external hard drive, thinking that if my computer crashed that those precious puppies would be safe on my external drive. So when my external hard drive took a crash yesterday afternoon I was totally shocked and numbed with sadness. This is my family history we're talking about. It's my passion that I've spent days, weeks, months on. I know what most of you are thinking...why hasn't she printed them? Well, I want to create one of these books, but I can't do it until I've scrapbooked all of the gaps. I've done a ton of pages from when Henry was just a wee little one, and then a ton of pages from his recent days, but have yet to fill in the middle. You just can't print a postbound book until you've got the whole span of time done. Plus, it's going to cost me hundreds of dollars, and I don't have that right now. Well, I just forked out $150 for a local computer repair shop to copy my external hard drive onto a new one (something about a broken chassy for you gurus). That's $150 I could have used to print the darn pages.

To make a long and depressing story short I'm glad I got out of this mess with only spending 150. I was getting crazy quotes this morning that data recovery costs anywhere from $300-$1200. My lesson is learned. I will no longer trust electronics....they do and WILL go bad. We will be buying a second external hard drive shortly to backup the first drive. I just can't live risky like this any longer. Afterall, who wants to live without cute scrapbook pages of their children's youth? Not me.