Sad Day

Last Friday I was checking my favorite YouTube channel that has fantastic makeup tutorials when all of a sudden I got the dreaded error on my PC telling me there was an unexpected hard drive failure. Seconds later I get a McAfee alert telling me that it had detected a few Trojans that will be removed. I may not be a computer whiz but something told me this was not a coincidence. Apparently McAfee just wasn't quick enough b/c those Trojans did some damage before getting taken out. And by some damage I mean it wiped out my entire hard drive.

My first reaction was to re-enact the printer mauling scene from Office Space on my computer but then I remembered that I had finally gotten an external hard drive a couple months back to keep all our files backed up in the event of this kind of catastrophy. So I calmly re-installed our OS and proceeded to reload everything. As I clicked through the backup files, I couldn't help but feel like something was missing. There were our previous tax returns, my obsessive budget-tracking spreadsheets and of course my collection of recipes from the last 5 years of Costco cookbooks. Then it hit me.

All. Of. Our. Pictures. Were. GONE.

Pics from our trip to Hawaii for my mom's 60th birthday, pics from the holidays, our engagement pics, wedding pics, honeymoon pics, H's professional pics, pics from our first family trip to Portland, ALL the pics from H's entire first 16 months of life. GONE.

I'm holding back tears as I type this. HOW could this have happened? Did I make a mistake when I set everything up and forget to back up our picture files?? I was always paranoid that something would happen to our computer so instead of deleting the pics from our camera's memory card, I would just get more memory cards which got to be quite costly. So ever since we got the external hard drive, I was finally able to bring myself to clear the memory card everytime I uploaded pics onto our computer. Now we have nothing. Well, I still have all the pics I have on Facebook and on this blog but it's just not the same. They're not the original files.

I've come to the realization that this disaster was meant to help detach me from Earthly things. I have a healthy son, a wonderful husband and a loving family. I still have the memories of everything those pictures captured in my mind and should focus on making future ones. Maybe I'm being over-dramatic to some but it was a hard lesson learned and I'm still working on it.

The secondary take-aways from this story are:

1. You best be sure to triple checking files being backed up from here on out.
2. Do NOT go to makeupgeek.com

I hope your Mondays have started out better than mine!