Thank Goodness for Blogs!

Oh how I wish I had been blogging since 2002 and that I kept up blogging in 2010. Most of you might know our latest story. It all began last October. Or maybe that is where it ended. I had been so diligent with keeping our pictures organized. I had everything organized in Years, Months, and events. Todd had been so busy all year scanning in old Oswald family slides. He and Sherrie had identified and labeled them all. He was almost done photo editing them as well as the several files of antique photos we had scanned from Grandma Rhodehouse. I spent most of the year scanning in negatives from 1989 to 2002. I also diligently had them backed up on a large portable hard drive. Then came our mistake.... One day I noticed Todd "fixing" photos straight on the back up drive. I knew when I backed up our photos from the computer to the portable his "fixed" files would be erased. So I merged the back up drive with the main computer. In the process I filled up the hard drive on the computer. I then copied everything from the computer back to the hard drive. I compared both folders and confirmed that all was well. We had 53,000 files. Here comes the big mistake. I deleted everything off of the main computer. It was full and I couldn't do anything on it. I decided to delete everything then make a back up on the main computer with a zip drive from the portable hard drive. Are you still with me? Sounds smart right? Well not so. While in the process of making this back up zip file, my portable hard drive crashed. We couldn't access it at all. We took it in to a local computer recovery place. They told us to turn off our computer and quit using it until they could see what they could recover from the portable. 9 weeks later they told us they recovered 12,000 files. Not the same as 53,000 but better then nothing. They told us it crashed bad. There was damage to the disks and that they couldn't access the 6th disk at all. I queasily paid the $850 and took my files home. At home we found that many of those 12,000 files were corrupt. Many others were thumbnails only. Later I was able to get around 13,000 files from an old computer and another 6,000 off of this computer. So now we have the daunting task of sorting through over 30,000 files. No file structure was saved. No order. We have Brecken's birth next to Jessi's graduation. Everything is messed up. We also have thousands of files from facebook profiles, and album art that were recovered. We have to go through each of those also.
Miracles have happened though. I found some disks that Todd had backed up in 2005. So it looks like we have everything up to that point. Todd also found a box of favorite slides he saved from his family slides. I never threw away our negatives that I scanned in so we can redo that as well. I am now digitizing our boxes full of video tapes so that I can figure out when some of these photos occurred so I can get in order again. Then there is the miracle of blogging...I have all these photos from March 2009 to September 2009. If that isn't incentive to blog again I don't know what is... The moral of this story? Back up, Back up, Back up. We were told to have our files in at least three different locations on different types of media. By the way facebook doesn't count. It saves the files at a very low resolution. An now a plea from me. If you have pictures of our family from 2005 to present, could you send them to me. I will be forever grateful! Also if you have any old Oswald photos, (Leon and Trenna's Kids) I would love to get those together again. I promise they will be well taken care of. .... And double, triple, quadruple, backed up.