Today, I lost two terabytes' worth of photos to a friend's incompetence. He said he could save me some money and fix my slow computer for free. He ended up wiping the hard drive, and along with it, my photography portfolio from the last five years. FML
Collection
Thanksgiving
Questions about your love life, a burnt turkey and the cousin who knows everything: Thanksgiving, a contact sport.
Today, my external hard drive broke. My husband tried to fix it, and the computer told him he needed to format it. Apparently he didn't know what formatting does, so he did it. I'm a wedding photographer and had a full summer of unfinished wedding photography on there. FML
Today, I deleted a load of junk that was messing up my mother's computer. I don't know how I'm going to tell her I accidentally wiped out all of her wedding photos. FML
Today, my husband accidentally erased some pictures from our hard drive. No worries, nothing major: just everything from our wedding and the birth of our first child. FML
Today, my computer stopped working. Me, the technology challenged one, decided to do a system recovery on it hoping that I could make it better. Turns out, system recovery means deleting all the files off the computer including family photos, music and assignments and starting fresh. FML
Today, my computer crashed and lost all of its data while I was making a back up. FML
Today, my parents got me a new computer for my birthday. They also took the liberty of throwing out my old computer, with 8 years of photos, videos, music, documents, emails, and bookmarks on it. But that's okay, I had a backup. They threw that out too. FML
Today, I got a new computer because my old one crashed, deleting all music, photos, and documents. I still had all my music on my iPod though, and went to sync it to the new computer. By accident, my younger brother pulled the cord out before it was done, deleting all 3,000 songs forever. FML
Today, the new office IT guy figured the best way to get the virus off my computer was to wipe my entire hard drive. He was kind enough to back my data up and restore everything from the backups. Including the virus. FML
Today, I woke up to find out that my phone, which contained all of my pictures and videos from the past year, had completely crashed. Despite trying everything, I couldn't recover any of the data, even from the cloud backup. All those memories, gone forever. FML
Today, somebody broke in to my house and stole my laptop, which had years worth of family photos on it. Where was I when it was stolen? At Staples, buying supplies that included CDs to finally back up my pictures. FML
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Top comments
Cookiedough1987 4
This is why you have an external hard drive to save these important things onto when you are letting someone unqualified (I'm guessing) mess with your stuff.
theslimshadylp 6
Holy shit five years? I would give your friend the wrath of God if I were you.
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Comments (300)
berossm 7
If you don't backup you take that risk.
lw73 2
YDI for so many reasons. If your photos were so previous, you would have sacrificed the $100 for an external hard drive. I guess you had to learn the hard way.
podsy 2
If He reinstalled windows then u can look for a file called windows.old and your pictures should still be in your folder
lhamil64_fml 5
You may be able to recover them, but any free file recovery software probably won't recover them all. If they're really important and you don't have a backup, SHUT OFF THE COMPUTER NOW and find a professional file recovery service. The longer you use your computer, the harder it is to recover the pictures. As everyone else said, you really should have had a backup, so maybe you can learn from this experience to get an external hard drive and start doing regular backups of anything you can't afford to lose.
Major_General 10
It's not backed up unless there are three copies, on two separate storage forms, one of which is at a remote site somewhere. YDI.
FleshForFantasy 3
RULE #1 - ALWAYS back up your files!
satanisthesavior 21
As pretty much everyone else said, backups are a very good idea. However, backing up stuff can be a pain. So, what I would recommend, is just purchasing an external hard drive and keeping all the pics on that. The external will be a fairly safe place, since it is isolated from the rest of the computer, so if the computer goes bad the external is still good and you can just hook it up to another computer if you need to. I would still do backups just to be safe (maybe once a month or so), but putting the stuff on an external drive will make them much safer than keeping them on the internal drive.
AntoshaChekhonte 6
In the words of Pam, holy shit snacks. I'm an author and if someone messed up my hard drive, I would cry, scream, throw things, throw them, etc. On the other hand... I also back up my files weekly. Or whenever I'm done with a huge project. ... you do back up your files right?
jshthssn50 2
You may still be able to recover them. When something is erased from a hard drive, it always leaves, a footprint behind, do the files may still exist in some form. Just get a professional to check it for you, see if it's possible.
LunaShy 3
Doesn't really matter there is a program that can pull up all felted files my friend has it. Nothing is ever deleted completely he has got files back on mine when the same thing happened to me it's data recovery.