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
Fall
Dead leaves, the first cold of the season and an umbrella flipped inside out: fall, the season of grace.
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)
Sicilysstallion 2
Computers suck
avamorrison 0
That happened to me!!!
scr_sensei 14
It's not your friends fault you didn't back up your ENTIRE PORTFOLIO. Important data should be saved a minimum of 3 places if you don't want to lose it. LEARN YOUR LESSON. BACK UP YOUR SHIT.
skyeyez9 25
Start uploading to shutterfly. When you register with them you get the first 30 picture printouts free. Print favorites out and keep rest in online photo album.
j_cat187 20
Your fault for not backing it up.
biglittlehead 12
How the hell do you have two terabytes worth of pictures? A big file for a pic is maybe 100 kb.
countrygirl626 16
1) No, some pictures can be over 1 or 2MB. 2) OP said it was a photography portfolio for the past 5 YEARS.
darkmis1 18
Why didn't you have it backed up some place else?
caitiebug1119 15
In his defense, two terrabytes is a TON of memory and using up too much memory makes your computer slow. That's why you should've followed the example of every photographer from before computers were widely used and keep your portfolio in a book. And you also should've asked him what he was going to do and tell him "My portfolio is on there and it's not backed up, don't mess with that". To him, all he saw was the computer screen saying "You are using a lot of memory and this can slow down your computer". He probably assumed, after five years, you've had the sense to back up your files. If you can somehow recover your pictures, print them out and put them in a binder, or at least back them up on several flash drives or CDs.
enderless 6
your data is still on the hard drive(s) and can be recovered, but continual use of the pc may over write them so you need to act immediately. stop using the pc immediately and purchase an external hard drive. download photorec (from another computer!) and burn it to a DVD. photorec runs from the CD and will write to your external. it should pull your data, although you might not get back everything and going through 2+gb of photos will be fun. gl
metalflower01 7
All photographers know to back things onto DVDs and externals for this exact reason. Sorry for your loss, though. No picture can ever be duplicated.