There are not enough swear words...

... for what happened this afternoon.

It was my own stupid mistake, which makes me even more frustrated. I went to my External Hard Drive to grab a few photos only to find that my collection of foldered photos were no longer there, all I had was four semi-recent folders. Everything was gone! I started panicing (not like me!), I couldn't breath properly, my head was spinning and i felt as if I was going to pass out. Then came the tears. I was in such a state that I couldn't even phone Mr M because my brain wasn't functioning properly and I couldn't remember his mobile. Fortunately he phoned me (must have had his spidey senses going) and it was just as well it was him and not some cold caller 'cos all they would have got was a crying hello.

As you know I had updated my OS a few months ago and put all of the photos onto the external hard drive as well as saving them on my laptop and on Mr M's computer. Thank fuck for that at least. Trouble was earlier on I was having problems finding them on my laptop as I was too busy trying to breath rather than logically think where they would be saved. As I started to calm down with the aid of a rather large glass of 42 Below (best Vodka in the world!), I managed to find the files on my laptop. Hugh sigh of relief! The only problem is that the files I lost were all in order and had been named correctly and were neat and lovely and... you get the idea. But that said, I am sooooo happy that I at least have not so tidy copies of them. I'm currently having them swished over to my Mac from Mr M's PC via SAMBA - what a great invention!

So, what happened? How did I manage to fuck up so royally? Well, after I copied all of my photos to my external hard drive I loaded on the new OS from scratch and so wiped everything that was on the Mac. Not a problem, all my photos were stored on the ext HD. Then when I had new folders of photos that I had taken recently that I wanted to back up on the ext HD I copied the main folder across to the same location, thinking, wrongly, that it would realise that I wanted to add the folders inside to the existing ones on the ext HD. But instead what happened was in overwrote the original main file meaning tha it was bye-bye to the original 20 odd folders and hello to the 4 new ones instead of there now being 24 folders.
The reason for my stupidity is that I still don't understand how to use the Western Digital External hard Drive properly and thought it would just update the original main pictures folder and not overwrite the damn thing. Lesson painfully learned!

So once I have the old photos back on my Mac an not on the ext HD, and after re-filing them all nicely my next few days are going to be taken up with buying a shed load of DVDs to burn my photos on and have an old fashioned way of storing them as well. It's something I've been meaning to start doing for awhile and this has proved to me that I need to do it sooner rather than later for fear of losing my photos completely. Yes, I could print them out as well but the cost of doing that would be phenomenal. Just on a recent holiday to NZ I took 3GB of photos and had another 3GB of memory to use as well. I enjoy snapping :-)

And that is also the reason why I haven't blogged for ages. First there was the planning of the NZ trip and then the trip itself. As soon as i can i shall do a 2 part blog of our adventures in New Zealand, but for now all I will say is WOW!



EDIT: After copying across the files and renaming and organising them, I have just started to back them up on the Ext HD only to find that what I thought I had lost I hadn't! I noticed that the scroll bar was longer than usual and after scrolling past nothingness for quite sometime, I finally come across all of my photos. Bloody thing had decided it didn't like the way that I had them set out and his jigged them around into what can only describe as a mess. But they are all there and tomorrow I will start to burn them onto DVD. Damn technology scaring the living jeebies out of me. GRRRRRR! and PHEW! :-D