Sunday, March 29, 2015

We're back in business!!

$800 later, we got our recovered data on St. Patrick's day!  Yay!
It was expensive, but totally worth it to get back all those precious memories!!
Since getting our data back, we've backed up our photos 4 times!
It's probably a little excessive, but we're being super cautious now.
I haven't been able to blog until now because the same day we got our data back I got a code from Shutterfly for a free photo book and only had a week to finish it.  So, with my work schedule and using every spare minute I could to work on Aurora's photo book, I'm now getting the chance to blog again! Woo! Hoo!!

Now on to getting caught up.  I back dated our last post for December, but all our other updates will follow this one, so don't miss our December Part 2 post!

P.S.  While working on the Shutterfly photo book I just made for Aurora, I found an online website that has FREE unlimited photo storage.  It's called This Life by Shutterfly. Yet another reason why I love Shutterfly!!
The unlimited photo storage is free, but if you want video storage you have to pay an annual fee.  Just FYI :)

Sunday, March 8, 2015

Don't give up on me!

I feel I have to explain the reason for my lack of blogging over the last few months because I've had several people ask me recently why I haven't been blogging.  Thank you to those of you who still read our blog and haven't given up on me!

*Rewind to mid-January*
I had dedicated myself to getting up early (5am, or maybe 6ish) on Sunday mornings until I get caught up on my blogging and creating the Shutterfly books I want to make.  So, one Sunday late in January I woke up to blog more about our Christmas, and the external hard drive we keep all of our photos and videos on could not be found by our computer, although it was plugged in.  I gently woke Darwin up to see if he could help me with it, thinking I was missing something or that it was right in front of my face and I just couldn't see it.

But no, our computer really couldn't find it, and when we tried to open it up we got a pop-up error asking if we wanted to reformat the drive.  Not a good sign!  I was heartbroken and sick over thinking we've lost all of our photos and videos from our 9.5 years of marriage.  Ugh! It still makes me sick!

Due to our busy schedule we didn't take it up to the Geek Squad until probably two weeks later.  They tried recovering our info while we waited but nothing came up.  We gave them a deposit and they said they'd try to recover it using some other software they had on hand, but if they couldn't recover it they'd refer us somewhere else.  I was hoping beyond hope that they'd be able to recover it (because that would be AWESOME and the cheapest route for us) but unfortunately they couldn't recover it, so they gave us our deposit back and referred us elsewhere.

The next step was to take our hard drive to a company in Salt Lake and hope they could recover it.  With their business hours and Darwin's work schedule it was tough to get up there before they closed, but we finally did it about two weeks ago.  They ran a data test on it and determined they needed to send our hard drive to their main base in Denver, CO.

We've been receiving daily emails about how the progress is coming with the recovery of our data, and the updates are hopeful, but we're still not sure if they've been able to recover all of our precious photos and videos.  I'm really hoping to get some good news tomorrow!  We know it's going to be expensive but totally worth it to get back all those priceless photos and videos!

We've been praying on a daily basis, multiple times a day, that our data will be recovered.  We had backed up a lot of it, but it's been a while since we backed it up last and I think it's at least all of Savannah's lifetime that hasn't been backed up.

So, if you think of us in your evening prayers tonight, say a little prayer that our data will be recovered and hopefully I'll be back to blogging and online scrap-booking soon!

*A word to the wise*
If you haven't backed up all the info on your computer lately, don't wait!  Do it NOW!  And then as an extra precaution...back up your back-up!