Our Summer Techno-Drama

This morning was one of that kind of joy that comes along once in a blue moon. And no, it's not because as of 8:00am this morning I crossed the threshold to being exactly a quarter of a century old.

For nearly the entire summer, I haven't been able to do much with this blog or my computer because I made a serious error in judgment when using my external hard drive earlier in June and accidentally erased the ENTIRE drive.

The worst part? This was our backup drive, so the backups were all deleted AND we lost some of our most treasured memories: photos from our honeymoon in Italy and France, every video we've recorded or made over the past year in Japan, our entire wedding day video (still in progress, it's a monster of a job), and my iTunes library of several thousand songs. More than a few times I've felt physically sick thinking about having lost so many important things with a simple operator-error.

So, I've been reluctant to use my computer almost at all this summer while I sent the hard drive to data recovery services in a desperate attempt to regain what we had lost. At one point, our current housemate's roommate at Augsburg, who is a phenomenal computer programmer, took the drive and found that everything was actually still there! He couldn't recover the photos, videos etc. because the file names were all lost, but it was all there nonetheless. Kudos Eric, master of the Nerd-world.

I called around and found a fantastic service for nearly half of the cost of the Mac-store recommended company "On-Track." Their estimate was a minimum cost of $700 to restore the lost data. The company that found the data, sorted it out file by file for us, and is sending it back to us today with the recovered data is called "Sector Logics Data Recovery" in Lakewood, Colorado. Their cost? $277.

Here is their link: http://www.sectorlogics.com/
Please send it to anyone you know who needs this kind of service. They are professional, fast-working, and were successful in helping us when we really needed (affordable) help.

Once we receive the drive we'll get back to blogging and I'll post some photos and stories from our adventures this summer. It's been a great one, so keep in touch and thanks for your patience in our blogging absence.