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)
coconutdaydream 7
Also like they ^ have said, just don't write anything else to your computer and the files will most likely still be there to recover.
stej1985 3
2Tb is a huuuuuge amount.. put in easy terms its the same as 400 copies of every episode of CSI (each version). so the people saying 'you can get a cheap external' are wrong lol. there's some business servers that don't have that sort of storage so realistically it would be over several externals. now fyl op but you can get it back..take it to a data recovery company. I'd do it but its a huge task for my crappy PC.
downtime 13
Here you can get a 1.5TB external drive for $88 that I saw on TV. I doubt 2TB would cost even close to the cost of the camera, laptop or even the cost of putting the computer in to be repaired professionally. Some business servers...? They probably don't need that much space, and why would you compare a business server to an external hard drive?
Heisenberg7 2
Absolutely DO NOT take it to a data recovery company. They are way too much money. That should be your ABSOLUTE LAST RESORT, especially and only if the hard drive itself is physically damaged (You're talking upwards of $3000 for that amount of data). You can recover your photos with off the shelf software for cheap. Buy an external drive, buy some recovery software, and stop writing anything to those drives until you can recover everything.
Squeaky_Tomato 14
I got a 3TB external for $110. So yes she should have gotten a cheap external.
SanaSazi 32
I'll bet once you reload the os it will go way faster than before, but seriously that sux
CeltHound 14
From now on back up your stuff on Picasa or Google Drive!
blubberfish 10
This is why we can't have nice things..
b3tazoid 5
Should have had a backup drive. YDI
cporteous 2
If you have 2 terabytes worth of photos in only 5 years then you deserve to have your camera taken away
jonsey974 3
2 terabytes?! As in like 2000+ gigs?!?!?! Holy shit...fyl for losing an ungodly amount of data, but ydi for keeping that much around without any kind of backup in the first place. 2TB and you wonder why your computer was slow OP lol.
the_true_batman 10
The amount of data you have on your hard drive has nothing to do with how fast your computer is, unless you're swapping out RAM to disk (in which case it doesn't matter so long as you have enough disk remaining). Even if your hard drive is full and so can't swap out to disk, that's a terrible idea typically, because it is up to 100,000 times slower than RAM. So her having 2 TB of data won't slow down her computer so long as she has extra space (even if she was using 2TB out of 2.01 TB she'd be fine), and even if she didn't have extra space, installing more RAM could be up to 100,000 times faster than freeing up disk space.
Gnu_fml 9
There are ways to save it! Don't give up yet! Try to find a firm specialized in these matters. Good luck!
Equin0x 0
Have you never heard of backups? What would you of done in the event of hard drive failure?