Techno Disaster

It seems like every other year or so our computer slowly slips away into the land of old computer junk.  This may be related to the fact that I buy used PCs to start with, but still…  

The worst thing about that is that it is a pain to try to get all our old data off the nearly dead PC and load it on to the nice shiny, new one.  So, last year I bought an external 160 GB hard drive and put everything we cared about onto it.  I figured we were then safe from computer death and could just move the external drive to any new computer we chose to use. 

WRONG!

The shiny, new external hard drive crashed and burned.  It turns out that when a hard disk crashes there are several levels of how hard it is to recover data.  The worst possible is where the crash destroys the directory that tells the computer where to find files.  In that case, they need to take it into a clean room (expen$ive), disassemble it, and install it into a special drive ((expen$ive) to read it sector by sector trying to recover undamaged data.  Guess which kind ours is?  I got two quotes:  $1,100 and $1,300.   Among other things, all our photo files are on it, including last year’s photos which I hadn’t got a Round Tuitt for writing DVDs for everyone.  I have most (hopefully all) of last year’s on the old hard drive, so I can recover those.  But at some point, I made the transition to this new, “bullet-proof” hard drive and all those are gone, gone, gone.  Photos of Roko we took in Calif. – gone.  Photos of various grandchildren who have visited us this year – gone.  Photos of the great pig hunt where Keith and I took a couple of our friends to a pig-shooting ranch – gone.  Photos of this year’s Dallas Blooms where we took many photos of different kind of flowers, close-ups and landscapes – gone.  I still hope to find a way to recover.  It’s a dim hope, but the flame still flickers.

So, that’s what’s new from sad ole Grandpa.