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
Halloween
A failed costume, stolen candy and a very real scare: Halloween, the one night when fear is allowed.
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)
Laurenlou 24
Well that really sucks! But the pictures are actually still on your computer, stored in some place I don't know the name of, until you physically break the computer. I'd suggest sending it to someone who knows what they are doing to try to retrieve the lost files! Worth a try!!
boredphil 4
Depends, files are usually just "deleted" by changing part of the file name to mark it as dead. Undelete utilities can recover those, if you find yourself in this position DO NOT install anything/create files as this may overwrite the location of the files on the disk. In this case however, she says the HDD was wiped (restore disk?), so the actual data may have been overwritten. There are data recovery services that specialise in these things, but they are NOT cheap, so it's a value judgement.
wugui 1
What if OP's friend used CCleaner to wipe the drive? If so, than it's not possible to recover it.
boredphil 4
Unless CCleaner goes to extreme lengths (DoD style), then data is at least partially recoverable, hence my comment about the pro data recovery people - wouldn't want to pay their fees though.
Jirekianu2 19
Some reformatting or other disk clean programs write all the hard drive sectors to 0. Meaning no data is recoverable by anyone.
lhamil64_fml 5
I'm assuming that the "friend" just reinstalled the OS, why would he bother using something like DBAN to fully erase the disk?
boredphil 4
This is incorrect. Properties of magnetic media (incl traditional hard drives) mean that data may be recovered even if you zero all sectors. Of course this is only to data recovery pros/labs. This is why DoD have specific protocols for "shredding" drives, usually involving 7 passes containing specific bit sequences.
astralvagan 20
Sucks that happened to you.... A word of advice or next time is online backup for data you can't afford to lose.... And sue the shit out of your friend.
Mizuy 7
Her friend was doing it for free, she agreed, it was most likely an accident and you still want her to sue him? Are you gonna suggest her to lie to the court as well?
astralvagan 20
Is it possible her friend represented himself as a professional? If so, it was a mistake to trust wrong person. If he wasn't a professional, then that's just poor judgment. Lesson learned though is back your stuff up.
ramakandra 3
you didnt think to back something this important up? in 5 years? im sorry for your loss, but that sounds kinda dumb to me, hope you learned?
rebanne 5
Idiot.
Cetega 1
Go download Piriform's "Recuva" program. You may be able to get at least some of it back.
s0m3guy2010 21
Does no one else find it strange that OP has two terabytes worth of photos over just 5 years? Considering one photo takes up little to no space, OP must really like taking pictures.
Colecto_fml 26
One single photo from a professional camera has 14+Mb, while RAW format photos can be 40+Mb per photo! Now imagine how many she must've collected over 5yrs.
AussieChild 22
Well OP did say it was a portfolio; it's likely she does it for work.
s0m3guy2010 21
26- Even at 40MB, that still makes 50,000 photos over 5 years. I haven't even taken that many photos in my lifetime.
Colecto_fml 26
Never underestimate a photographer. Just for one final I took over 300 photos. Filled up my hard-disk. She may be saving all the photos she took, not just the great ones.
numbersystem 4
I got 65000+ photos on my flickr. Pro photographers easily take more.
j_cat187 20
She could have the nikon D800 and be shooting raw. I just started shooting raw and now I need a new hardrive.
Darthbane2007 19
Maybe she has one of those DSLR Cameras like Nikon or Canon that take those huge quality photos...
BatGirl596 6
That sucks OP I would hate to lose all of my pictures.
IOmnomHard 10
After reading your profile, I have to agree with your statement about you having ADHD...
EmFrys 7
Why didn't u have the files backed up? Sounds like your incompetence go me.
ruabadfishtoo 0
**Why didn't you have the files backed up? It sounds like you're the incompetence one to me.
3yellowzebras 19
*Incompetent ;)
Dekarian 7
63 - You know, other than typing "u" instead of "you" and misspelling "to" as "go", which is easily done if she's on a phone, those sentences are grammatically correct and your "correction" is pointless.
minirooter 1
That data can be saved of you haven't used the hard drive yet! Really I'm being serious no joke
fmessiah 19
Backup, backup, backup, backup. If it isn't backed up it isn't important.