21,775 photos since January

Wow, so here’s a lesson for the many photographers that I know read this blog: BACK UP YOUR BACK UPS!!! Fortunately, this is something I was taught a long time ago.

Here’s something I wasn’t.

Always safely remove or eject any external hardware from a USB port before unplugging said external hardware. Here’s why:

In my best pseudo-technologic-knowledge lingo, unplugging something like say, an external harddrive from a usb port without being able to safely eject it can rearrange some ones and zeros, destroying the way the file system is set up on the drive. This means your computer can’t find/read the files anymore and suddenly you’re left staring doe-eyed and blankly at an “empty” folder. Such as what happened to me Saturday night when the external hard drive froze up and then died, forcing me to yank the cord. (That’s right, I can do a good injured “doe-eyed” look when appropriate!)

Fortunately for myself, when I married my husband, part of my dowry was a group of superpowered technology geeks such as one Brian Garcia. (He does wedding videography too!!) He recovered 21,775 RAW photo files from our external hard drive.. 20,000 of which I realized I had taken since JANUARY of THIS YEAR. That’s a lot of clicks!

Moral of the story is: don’t depend on external hard drives. BURN baby, BURN! Love some dvdr’s.

Oh yeah, I also found a lot of old jpg files I thought I had deleted, which just goes to show how deleted photos aren’t necessarily gone.. Now, does that make some of you nervous???