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)
Timmeeh 17
Before you do anything to that hard disk, it's usually possible to restore files stored in a contiguous block, and possibly even fragmented ones, depending how much of a number your friend did on the file system; google "hard disk recovery" and a bit of searching should find you something appropriate. The more data you write to that hard disk now, however, the less you'll be able to get back so I'd suggest you stop using it immediately, don't even turn the computer on, and preferably remove the disk and run said software from another machine. You won't get everything, most of those programs have trouble with fragmented files when the filesystem's been rewritten (they search for known headers then read a block) and I'm guessing it will have been, but some has to be better than none. Next time... remember to back up regularly and obsessively. I like to take the approach that my thesis is out to destroy my life by corrupting itself or murdering the hard disks in my office machine. As such, I back the thing up to as many computers as I own as often as the thought of losing the changes I've made terrifies me. So about every 4 hours.
ruabadfishtoo 0
tl; dr
Rodders_SOTC 1
You're the incompetent one.
docscientist 10
This is on you as well. Honestly, you should've backed up anything you considered too important to lose.
Jeffo193 13
Take it to a pro and they might be able to salvage something :-)
cswens25 8
Can't even begin to count the number of times I heard stories like this everyday when I worked in computers. But everybody "has a friend that's really good with computers". Oddly enough I was never surprised when things like this happened.
Heisenberg7 2
All is not lost. Just because a hard drive was formatted or the files were "deleted" (to the Recycle Bin) does NOT mean that the data is gone. Look at a program called Piriform Recuva and try to recover your data. There are other paid programs that do an even better job, but I've had plenty of success with Recuva after an "accidental" wipe/delete. Oh and, once you recover your data, learn your lesson. There's a saying in the computer world: "If you don't have at least 3 backups of your data than you must not care about it very much". If it happens again, it's 100% YDI.
Mahtari 19
Am I the only person left that can make computers work? **** this shit world.
Thale_fml 8
I'm sorry, but I have to say you deserved it. It sucks, yes, but if those photos were so valuable to you, why, why, why, WHY didn't you back them up? External hard drives are a very cheap investment, and would have saved you the loss you are now suffering. Sucks, but YDI.
ladyluck808 0
always backup your files if they are important you never know when your computer may go bad. next time go to a professional even of it cost money
coconutdaydream 7
I'm backing up backing up backing up backing up... cus my daddy taught me good, and I'm backing the hell out of there, and I'm like oh my god, oh my god my god.... anyone else sing this in their head when reading these comments? No? You should spend more time on YouTube then.