My Tragedy

Topic of the day: My little Chinese New Year heartbreak

Not to be melodramatic, but this really has been one of the most traumatic events I've been through in a while - and I need to vent.

This past week, I met a journalist friend of mine for coffee at a neighborhood cafe. Before he arrived, I had been editing some recent photos I took in Jiangsu Province - such as the one above (for reference, I work off of an external hard drive where all my photos are stored). Towards the end of our conversation, I offered to show him some of my better photos. I was maneuvering my laptop so he can get a better view when - WHAM - my accidentally nudged my external hard drive from the table to the floor.

Needless to say, my external hard drive is currently experiencing operational difficulties (to the extent of me not being able to access any of my files). Also need less to say, I am more than distraught.

Besides cursing myself at my own clumsiness, the real tragedy in this is that since I have purchased my external hard drive over a year ago, I have not backed up my hard drive once. In other words, all the shots that I have took and edited in the last year are only stored on that hard drive (and much smaller Internet versions on Flickr).

I took my hard drive to a data recovery center today and am hoping, hoping, hoping, that they can at least recover my "Edited Photos" folder.

The real irony in this is that just a few days prior to this whole incident, I was thinking to myself that I really need to backup some of my photos.

As Jason, the other witness to this tragedy puts it: "Let this be a hard lesson learned about the importance of backing up your files".

I should hear back from the data recovery agency in the next 2 days on the status of my files. Please cross your fingers for me!!!