Several weeks ago, my hard drive crashed. It was something mechanical, and the best efforts of myself, my husband, the technician from Dell, and a generous co-worker couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Dell bought me a new hard drive, but the warranty doesn't pay for data recovery, so I lost all the data I had written since my last backup, a couple of months ago. (Public service announcement: if you don't remember when you last backed up, stop reading this -- go backup -- then come back.)
It was a hassle, but the only thing that I'm really upset about is the digital photos of the boys that I lost.
I'm an enthusiastic, if not especially talented, amateur photographer and I take a lot of pictures of the boys. We've never had a professional photograph taken of them; I prefer the photojournalistic approach of capturing them in their native settings.
I'm embarrassingly far behind on their albums -- even more so now that I've moved to digital, and feel compelled to crop and adjust the lighting on most pictures before sending them to be printed. But I love being able to share photos with my distant family at the press of a button.
Daniel is quite fascinated by the camera, and by the pictures of himself. He sometimes asks if he can use my digital camera and -- with supervision -- I let him. The odd foreshortening produced by taking pictures from waist level is rarely flattering, but a valuable reminder of just how big adults are from his perspective. He also carefully composes pictures of objects that I would never think of photographing -- his feet, a ball laying on the floor, the dark television set.
I don't have a lot of photographs of myself as a small child. I was the youngest child, and my parents felt less compelled to document every step I took than they had been for my older siblings. And most of the pictures that my dad did take were slides, and cataloging and scanning them is more of an undertaking than any of us have energy to do.
I also don't have many memories before about age 5 -- and my parents tell me that some of the ones I do have didn't happen that way, that my grandfather didn't meet me at the base of the Eiffel Tower.
I wonder if there's a connection between the two gaps, whether I would remember more with photos to prompt me, or if I'd just make up stories to go with the pictures.
I lost my hard drive with all of my digital photos about a year ago. I sent photos to family members like you mentioned. I immediately emailed everyone I knew to have them email me any pictures they still had which I had sent to them. I didn't get them all back but I did get a few dozen. Just a thought...
I've made a habit of backing up my hard drive since then. I also keep my favorite picture on photos.yahoo.com as a secondary backup.
Good luck - I hope you can get some of your pictures back!
Posted by: Susan | November 26, 2004 at 05:08 PM