A dark cloud

[Michaelaw]

Since my motherboard died roughly a month ago I've had a string of failures and bad news hanging over me like you couldn't believe. It's almost as if my entire life changed for the worst that day. The latest madness happened yesterday when a 1tb drive failed taking with it 90% of my images among other valued files. A trip to my website was met with a 404 error message and when I called my hosting service the told me my public html folder was gone...All my images, blogs and web pages might as well never have existed. Three days ago I went to use my 3 chip pro video camera only to find it was dead, won't turn on for love nor money. I could continue with the list of crazy stuff that's happened since the day of the MB failure including bad noise from a visiting ex and some kind of weird cyber stalker drawn to me somehow by a connection with people from the past. It's like some universal overlord glanced down at me and said "That boy's getting a little complacent, I'm gonna have to shake his world a tad!" This morning almost sealed the deal when I was passing through an intersection on my way to work and some mini van ran a red light at speed passing no more than three feet from my front bumper. Had I been two seconds closer to work, I'd be dead or laid up pretty bad in a hospital. I'll sure be glad when the universe clicks back into normal

[Matt K.]

Newsflash: Universe IS normal ... I'd blame your string of bad luck on Harper, but I suppose this would be wishful thinking.

Sometimes we have a stretch of incidents like this, and it seems it goes from bad to worse. At times like that I watch the news and find out that other people are going through quite a bit more hardship than I am, and that puts things into prespective for me. At least there is no oil slick approaching your premises, there is not road side bomb nearby, and I suppose you don't starve, either.

Good news is that you could get your stuff back, though it might be a tad expensive. Think of it as a blessing: it shows you how fragile even the electronic world is, and we rely on it so much in these days. I suppose that is why we do not care for Mother Earth anymore, cause she does not seem important enough, though she is the most fragile.

[ericmark]

Your tail of woe is a night mare we all have. I look at my hard drive and some of the images are silly sizes where HRD and panorama have been used and I think do I really want to back up such large files onto DVD? With 4.7g per disk a tera-bite will take a whole spool of discs and even then so many times when one tries to read them they have gone wrong anyway.
So either you back-up just original RAW or final Jpeg and I have never really worked out which.
OK two hard drives. However likely it was fault in mother board which messed up hard drive so two may have not helped if used together.

However it is a wake up call for us all and we all must consider what should be backed up and where and how.

It happens to us all. Because I didn't trust my compact I took a load of pictures with my PDA while on holiday. They disappeared never did find where they went. And I look at the bashed up photos we have on card and paper from years gone by and wonder if we have gone backwards? Cracked and flaking but you can still see it was Uncle X or Aunt Y 70 years latter. I wonder how many of our pictures will still be around in 70 years time?

[Michaelaw]

Compared to the disaster in the Gulf Of Mexico, my ordeals seem trivial and that saga is going to get a whole lot worse. In comparison, my troubles equate to "Who the hell ate my red smarties!"

[JAS_Photo]

Sorry about your tale of woe, Michael. Sometimes bad stuff seems to trail along like the mouse's tail in Alice in Wonderland.

Lewis Carroll's "The Mouse's Tale"

Hope you get your photos back.

[jumpinjimmyjava]

Michael I am so sorry to hear of all your troubles. My son also lost ALL his images ! I think your luck is about to change (for the better ) You are alive, you didn't get killed in that car mishap. What more can I say - jimmy

[Michaelaw]

Stuff happens and generally I take it all in stride, it just strikes me as odd is all. Looking back to the morning I awoke to a dead computer, I remember a sort of intuitive feeling that the world I was used to had changed somehow. But in reality, even with all the weirdness of late, my life is still probably better than five billion other people on the planet. As for storage of data, I'm going to have to think long and hard on a secure method for that as this is the second time I've lost all my images. Maybe I should just get an Etch-a-Sketch

[jumpinjimmyjava]

Michael I use Carbonite ( up in the cloud) to backup off site. Its about $55 a year. It's better than nothing. I also hear Microsoft gives away free limited storage ( in the cloud) just Google it. - jimmy

[jumpinjimmyjava]

SkyDrive Explorer adds 25gb of free cloud storage to Windows Explorer

It,s FREE

[Mad Aussie]

Geez Michael ... can't get much worse surely!! So things should now be looking up.
Sorry to hear about your mum.

Your website hosting ... they have no backup?? We run a hosting server and do daily backups and a separate weekly backup.