Photo by Gerd Altmann - Source
Friday
So on Friday I had a meeting with the other photographers and the artists that I had recently gone on the trip with for the book about the Civil War. During the meeting we were going to be going over some of the pictures that we had taken and get some direction on how the book was going to go.
Photo taken by me @derangedvisions
So after I had chosen about 175 pictures to show, I exported them out of Adobe Lightroom and into a folder on my external hard drive and handed it over so we could all go over each other's submissions. That is where the trouble started....
After the hard drive was plugged into the computer I noticed that it took a long time for the contents to become visible. The folder with the pictures downloaded just fine and then I got my hard drive back. When I got home and plugged my hard drive in to start working on my photos some more, that is when I noticed that something was wrong.
My hard drive was not mounting to my computer and becoming visible. I don't like to unplug my hard drive without unmounting it correctly, so I shut my computer down and unplugged it. When I restarted my computer, I was able to mount my hard drive this time, but once again it took a long time for the contents to load. I started to get scared, so I got another external drive so I could move the contents of the drive to the new one. When I tried to move my Lightroom catalog over, the hard drive locked up and then unmounted itself.
This was when I started to become seriously worried because I knew that I had not backed up all of my pictures from the trip while we were traveling because it was taking too long every night and I was too lazy when I got home to do it. I got the hard drive that I had back stuff up to and checked it and saw that I only had the first three days of the trip backed up. This means that I would be losing just about all of the best shots if I were to lose that hard drive.
Photo taken by me @derangedvisions
So I tried a few more times to get things to transfer off of the HD and it was not working and everything was looking like the HD was either failing or corrupted. I didn't want to continue to stress the drive to I stopped messing with it while I contacted some people and let them know what was going on.
Saturday and Sunday
Both days of the weekend was spent trying to find a place that would be abel to recover my files. I took the HD to Best Buy and they weren't even able to get it to show up on any of their computers, so things were not looking good at this point.
I had been given several quotes on how much it would cost if I were to send my HD in to a company to get the files recovered off of it and the cost ranged from $400-$1600. That seems like a ridiculous amount of money, but considering how was spent on the trip for the book, that seemed like my only option, plus I hated the feeling of knowing that I had ZERO high resolution copies of any of my images from the trip.
Photo taken by me @derangedvisions
There are so many emotional images and experiences that are documented that the thought of losing them all was gut wrenching. I had been on a once in a life time experience and I hated the thought of losing everything from that.
Photo taken by me @derangedvisions
Monday (Today)
So after I put some finishing touches on my bowls in my ceramics class, I headed to my graphic computer applications class where we had to turn in our first assignment, which was taking a self portrait and recreating it using Adobe Illustrator.
Well, I had to explain to my instructor that my assignment was on my HD that was dead. I didn't tell him that I wasn't done with it, because I hadn't been able to work on it for the past few days, but I didn't really care about that assignment at this point.
I decided to plug the HD in to the school computers to see if that would fix anything, since they seemed to be the ones that ruined it in the first place during the meeting. When I plugged it in, I got nothing...
I plugged it in my Macbook and decided to try again at moving the files because I needed something to do while I was in this class because. Everything popped up right away...
This was looking good.
I tried to move like 3 pictures from the messed up drive to a brand new one and IT WORKED! I didn't want to get my hopes up, so I moved a few more over and they transferred without any problem.
So I spent the next few hours moving very small groups of photos from one HD to another until all 5229 photos from the trip had successfully been moved over. Then I was able to even move my .lrcat over from my Lightroom catalog to the new HD so I had all of my edits that I had made.
So now I have these files backed up on three seperate hard drives and up into the cloud. I should have done that in the first place. I got extremely lucky this time and I will definitely learn from this experience.
Photo taken by me @derangedvisions
Thank you for taking the time to read my ULOG. I am thankful to @surpassinggoogle for starting the ULOG initiative as a way of people sharing their experiences here on the Steemit platform. Terry does amazing things for people here on the platform and is always helping people out. You can help him out by voting for his witness @steemgigs.
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