I had started writing this post in February and wanted to finish it up and post it now because is still very relevant to anyone who works on a computer and especially if you are the keeper of the family archives and other super-important pieces of information… so I continue…

It’s been a pretty busy month around here, but by far the most stressful part of the month was when…I dropped my EHD on the floor…and nothing but a tiny rhythmic clicking sound could be heard.

Lights on but nobody’s home!  Yikes, slight panic and that awful sinking feeling of *&@(*^#@  this is going to mess up my day.  I work exclusively on a laptop so I rely on an external drive for storage of extra files including almost all of my digital scrapbooking supplies as well as my photo library from 2013 and backward.   Did I completely freak out??  Not at that moment.  Wanna know why?  Because I back up my laptop and my ehd to Time Machine.  Huge. Life. Saver.

While it was a hassle to order a new drive, and wait two days for it (free shipping worth being patient).  I plugged it in and spent a day and an evening restoring everything from the Time Machine.  Good. To. Go.

Until I realized that I was missing TWO YEARS of my photo library.  2013 and 2012  GONE.  That was the sick stomach heart wrenching moment.  Gone, Zip, Nowhere, went through my entire backup and they were not there!!!!  Probably 20k images disappeared into the ether.   Once I returned from my blackout, I realized that it wasn’t quite so bad because…. I PRINT OUT MY PHOTOS *gasp, I know, sacrilege right?  Not like the old days where you sent in a roll of film, and get prints back.  So while I don’t have every single photo that I took in that time frame, but I have the best of the best printed out and in my hands.

And I’ll update this little tale with…. I’m super glad (yet again) that I save stuff because on an old EHD that I had outgrown…on an old Time Machine backup from the beginning of 2014….guess what I found???? Yep, my 2012 and 2013 photo libraries.  All back safe and sound!!  Digital files and actual prints for the win.