Save your photos! NOW!

My PC is in the shop. Still. After erasing my hard drive, doing a restore and returning it back to us, we found it's still not working right. We returned the PC back to Best Buy, told them it's been through rehab and now needs to be hospitalized at the lab.

But I wasn't too worried, because I had used my new Black Friday purchase six weeks ago to backup all my emails and a few of the files in My Documents. Plus, I had most of my folders backed up on my Maxtor external hard drive (80gb) about a year ago.

The biggest possible loss would have been two critical files - my financial spreadsheet which I had just completed for 2007 so we can do our taxes, and my password spreadsheet which is where I track every single website's user name and password, registration numbers for appliances, and all other important information.

Good news first - financial spreadsheet - for some unknown reason I've decided to email it to myself, JUST IN CASE.

Password sheet - I have the last version of it on my laptop and only lost three months worth of registrations. Sucks, because I just registered our kitchen appliances and got warranties for them.

Photos.

Yeah, millions of photos. From 1999 through this year. Okay, where was I supposed to have them again? Oh, Maxtor. No problem, let's connect the Maxtor to my laptop and get it all saved into my other Black Friday purchase (MyBook 500 GB).

About that...

Maxtor (80GB) is dead. Kaput. No longer working. Worked fine two months ago. Now is dead.

Do I have another backup of photos? Sure, I have CD's that I made a couple of years ago. But this still means I've lost a tremendous amount of photos.

Thankfully, I married a computer geek. He took an old PC apart, broke the Maxtor to its components. Reconnected the Maxtor with new cables. Connected my new WD Black Friday purchase to the US drive, and we began the process of saving everything from the broken Maxtor to the new WD.

48 freaking hours later, it finally finished backing up 80GB worth of files. (Did I mention it was an old PC we used?).

Now, I have two external hard drives hooked to my laptop - WD (160gb) and MyBook (500gb), as I transfer everything to MyBook.

I still don't know the extent of my loss. I've uploaded a lot of photos to the website, so I do have a means to bring back most of my stuff. But that's going to take a considerable amount of time to do.

What I do know - next time I make a purchase on Black Friday, it's going to come out of the box the following day, and used within a week. No more procrastination.

Lessons learned - save your photos NOW. Use CD's. Don't trust those external hard drives.