When would be a good time...

[Indy]

to tell my wife that I think the computer thrashed all the baby pictures from 11-8-2004 to 12-29-2004? Given that these dates include Christmas and her first birthday, do you think it will be an issue? :roll:

Should I tell her by phone? Should it be a pay phone? Should I be in another time zone when I place the call? If you don't hear from me in a week or two, you'll know what happened...

[tt3]

Having a similar situation I'd advise backing up all the rest of your pictures then telling her, with a promise that you'll keep up on the backups to prevent it from happening again.
:shock:

um, but be ready to run away...

I re-installed win2k on my desktop and backed up pics and important files to disk, and semi-important but not critical to my 200gb drive then did the re-install. Forgot about a regedit hack to make the os recognise the 200gb drive and lost everything on that drive. including a months worth of pics... :cry:
I can totally feel for you! I even have a recovery program that didn't help :(

[Don-Dad]

You may consider taking it to a computer shop that might be able to retrieve the data, unless it's a virus issue?

[SideShowCecil]

Yep, me too.

I accidentally deleted all of our vacation pictures from my laptop. I’d suggest getting the bad news out of the way ASAP.

She was especially bent because most of the lost pictures were of our son and her family.

[homewithtwins]

I not only back up the pics to a DVD, I send a copy to each set of grandparents. Three copies of the kids pictures. Less chance of total loss. I do this every two months or so.

[Don-Dad]

Yeah, i'm super paraniod, i have 5 years of digi pics, back ups all over the place. 2 separate hard drives, some zip discs and CD's.

[SideShowCecil]

My screw-up occurred while we were still on vacation before we could get home and backup the photos to a CD. :oops:

I need to either upgrade to a new laptop with an onboard CD-burner or get portable external USB burner so I can back-up our photos on the spot. We’re heading to the East Coast in May and I really don’t want a repeat of the ‘deleted photos’ situation.

[Don-Dad]

get one of those little "flash" drives. I picked up a 1 gig drive at Officemax for $59. You can fit it in your pocket and not even know it's there. Plugs right into your usb port. Keep your eyes open for the drives on sale at compusa or best buy. The older smaller external drives are also getting pretty cheap but a bit of a pain to bring when traveling.

[SideShowCecil]

I’ve considered using a thumb drive or just getting more compact flash cards for the camera but I’ve had a run of bad luck with both.

I had a 256k thumb drive that crapped out suddenly around Christmas and a 256k compact flash card that crapped out last spring as well. The thumb drive was only a few weeks old, the compact flash card was about two years old. I don’t know if it was something environmental they were exposed too, if they were defective from the start, if they had reached the end of their life or I just had really bad luck. Since then though I’ve been reluctant to trust any data to flash memory.

I think the best solution would be just to get a new (second hand) laptop with a CDRW built in. An onboard wireless network adaptor would nice too. My son is obsessed with yanking my Linksys card out of the side my laptop.

[Jackson's Dad]

Or even just duplicate your directory of photos every week or month. A good portion of "accidental deletions" are not due to hard drive crashes, but to file corruptions or "user error". Whenever I take my laptop on the road, I create a dup (on the same drive) of all vital files. A trick I learned from going on the road demoing software.

[Indy]

The sad thing is, the computer these are on IS the back-up. It has three internal drives and an external drive (I think I've got roughly a TB of storage). It also has a DVD burner, so I have several ways to protect data. The real kick in the nuts was that I was backing up the photos from my laptop. Evidently, the wireless connection dropped packets or something. The simple solution would be to pull the files from the laptop, but it seems to have lost its operating system.

Whats scary is that I'm pretty comfortable with computer and software issues. Heck, I prefer to build my computers myself and have a pretty robust home office network. Lately, Murphy's been kicking me in the nuts, whenever he gets the chance.

[Jackson's Dad]

If you think the files are still on the laptop, you are probably in luck. Have you tried booting it from a system CD?

Or with a Mac, it's easy to connect a laptop to another computer (via Firewire cable) and mount it like a harddrive. Can you do this on your PC? It bypasses the OS, and would let you directly access the files. (Saved my butt many times.)

[maximus605]

Hi,

This happened to me when Ben was 6 months old. UGHHHH! The wife was not happy at all. Me either, I almost got sick as I saw this hackers face smailing at me as all my jpegs were being destroyed . It was that stupid "Love letter virus" from like 5 years ago. Turned all jpegs int .vbs thingys and there is no way in he** I will ever get them back. Luckily we did have some printed out and be some miracle I actauly just recently found some that I had copied on disks before that happened.

But, uh, the wife was pretty mad, but was forgiving after a few months :) actualy days.

Just back up on a disc and make sure your Anti-virus protection is up to date. I have and love Panda.

Justin

[Muz]

You can get an external drive housing for your laptop hard drive for $25-$50. You then connect the hard drive to another computer through USB or Firewire. I did this when the motherboard on my laptop died and we needed to extract files from the laptop.

They also sell adapters that will allow you to connect your laptop drive to your desktop as an internal drive. I think Fry's Electronics had one for about $6. Add another $10 or so if you want a permanent drive housing.

[Awwc]

Muz has the right idea. External hard drives are great. I've always got my thumb on the best online deals, if you ever want to splurge I can point you in the right direction.

Just got my 120 gig external to house my video and pics for 50 bucks.