In today's digital world, we collect a plethora of memories. Photos of almost anything that comes in front of your lens, especially since the era of the smartphone. Important adventures, just this and that, a quick photo because you have to remember something, you can't think of it or it will happen. Over time you notice that you have acquired quite a collection, and then it's time to go through all those photos again and make a selection of important memories, and photos that just take up unnecessary space on your hard drive. In short, photos of important moments and happy times, and photos that say nothing can therefore be removed. That's what I was doing for quite a few days. Sorting out important moments, and selecting photos that I no longer needed to keep, or that I had duplicates. You don't need to, at least... not on an external hard drive. Making a backup is fine, but duplicate photos on a hard drive are nonsense. I often had a smile on my face during the search, and also a lump in my throat ... but I went straight into panic mode when I seemed to have lost about 200 gigabytes of photos.
2018: Rowan & Myla
So what will you do when all these precious memories suddenly disappear? After I froze for a moment and panicked, I calmed myself down. And I reminded myself that there are also very good recovery programs. I needed that to save my memories.
Obtaining that software was not such a drama, that was already realized 5 minutes later. However, rescuing all my photos turns out to be an epic adventure that I didn't see coming. The scan of my 1 TB hard drive has already been running for 7 hours, 27% of my drive has been scanned so far, and already detected more than 130 TB of files. A tremendous amount of photo files loomed before my eyes. It's overwhelming. And I'm really in my hair with my hands about how I will solve this.
The first challenge I face is the enormous amount of time the scan will take. This can of course be solved. I can leave my PC running day and night to scan while I'm sleeping and doing other things. But the second challenge is one I can't solve right now. Because if 27% of the disk already yields more than 130 terabytes of lost files, what will it be when the scan is finally done? I don't have that storage space! The amount of files I would have to go through is insane! I can't just do that in an hour. I spent this evening looking at some of the previews of files I would be able to recover. And believe me, there are pictures of moments I had long forgotten.
2012: On a holiday in Germany with my sis 
Seeing these pictures brought me back to moments of happiness, love, adventure, but also sadness. What can be recovered is a digital journey through much of my life. Although I'm still on my rescue mission and haven't officially recovered anything yet, I've had a smile on my face many times thanks to this journey through my past.
2006: Whitebreasted Nuthatch
And of course, there is also something to learn from it. It taught me to cherish and protect the digital legacy. Memories are fragile, but also very precious. They are snapshots of moments of our past and we must ensure that they are not lost.
My adventure may not be over yet. I have yet to complete the scan, then spend a few days sifting through that immense amount of files to see what I'm going to recover and what I won't recover. Of course, some photos don't need to be restored at all. I would venture to say that this will be the vast majority. And that makes the task all the more difficult. But anyway, it will be a nice digital journey through my life.
By the way, I have to say that if I couldn't retrieve these photos, my life wouldn't stand still, I wouldn't crash on the spot, and my life wouldn't collapse either. The photos are digital proof, they are memories of moments I would like to remember, but the most important memories are etched in my memory and I don't need visual proof of that. I always carry it with me.
