Well folks, we just got our six-hundred-dollar baby video back and boy am I happy. I know what you are thinking. I can hear you all now, “What these fools paid that kind of money for a birthing video, did they have a crew in there or something?” Oh no, let me clarify something here. I paid $600.00 for a non-professional birth video. One that I actually made with the camera I sold my “never played” Nintendo Wii to get after Emmy the not-quite-a-champion greyhound decided to eat the other small video camera we had. Do I have you interested now?
Let me start by reminding you what I do for a living--I'm an IT professional. It's my job to fix other people's computer mess-ups. Folks, this IT professional is an idiot! We all know we live in this nice new digital age. The cost of video cameras that shoot digitally have plummeted. We purchased ours, as I mentioned already, for the cost of one Wii and some change. I wanted this particular model specifically for the convenience that led me down the road to paying to get something that was already mine back. At this point, I am struggling to not go into some overly rambling technical spew of buzzwords so let me insert below the text I sent some friends after I made one of the largest mistakes of the century.
Subject: Step-by-step, how to win the new dad of the year award.
1. Purchase sd flash camera to use for video recording of the baby’s birth and subsequent various activities.
2. Make sure the memory card is large enough to make you lax in moving things off the camera for backup or archival to dvd.
3. Wait until your wife asks you to let your friends borrow said camera to make a video for their grandpa’s bday to send back to Utah.
4. Take camera upstairs and look for somewhere to move data off to so they can snag it.
5. Find out that you have so much stuff on disk that you only have one place to put it in short order.
6. You place said files from camera onto less than year old Seagate 400gig drive.
7. The copy is uneventful and no errors present. Files are there to be edited later on the mac mini for placement on a proper dvd etc.
8. A few days later fire up the drive to at least back these files up to a dvd or another disk you’ve found to be on the “safe” side.
9. Have the worst feeling ever as your gut sinks and you realize the drive is dead.
10. Realize you suck because you have now lost the only video you have of your first kid being born.
11. This step is optional (and could be delayed until when the wife asks to watch the footage again): It’s where you tell your wife and she goes !@#&^&* on you and beats you down like the sorry sack that you are. (Actual excerpt from email sent to friends...)
So as you hopefully can surmise, I made a big booboo. I broke the number one rule of keeping any important data safe. ALWAYS have more than one copy at any given time. I broke my own rule and it stunk in a major way. By taking the footage off of the camera so that it could be borrowed and placing a single copy, on a single external disk I was practically inviting good ole Murphy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law) to come by and pay us a visit. He lives here anyway so it wasn’t a long trip.
Hard drives fail folks. Let me say it again just to make sure we all heard it. HARD DRIVES FAIL. It’s not if, it’s WHEN. If there is anything that is really special to you all out there that only exists in a single place and especially if that single place has moving parts (hard drive). Back it up now, or use a thumbdrive to move it to your significant other’s laptop. Do something, anything, just get those special pictures, videos, etc whatever into more than one place. Heck, I mean while we’re on the subject, let’s introduce a little of what they call in the business “geographic diversity”, that is to make your other copy exist somewhere away from you. This way if something happens to you house (fire, theft) etc that you don’t lose your main and your backup copy of your memories. Have that backup DVD sent to grandmas for safe keeping, or check out some of the numerous online backup firms, they are not that expensive for the peace of mind.
John at hddsavers.com of Florida was absolutely awesome in helping us get the data back. I would have saved a little bit of money had I not wasted many many many hours using some software( great software but i should have just sent this away from the beginning for the sake of time and sanity) until nothing at all would work and the drive finally gave up the ghost. John was able to open the drive up in his cleanroom facilities and do some parts swapping with a donor drive to get it wake up long enough to get the much needed files off. He placed the recovered data on a new external drive and shipped it up to us (keeping a copy until we confirmed we had recieved ours, in case the USPS had a visit from Murphy as well.
Needless to say, my wallet is much lighter now, but I have something back that was irreplacable--watching the miracle of our lives--Lucy--being born.
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