At the end of August, Rachel and I arrived in Baton Rouge after a lovely honeymoon. One of the goals at that point was to gather all of our digital photos and put them together the same (an hopefully secure) place. Five months earlier in March, Rachel got a flash drive with a ton of memory on it. We decided to transfer the pictures onto there. For those of you keeping tabs of Rachel's blog her post March 15th of '08. Here is an excerpt:
“I thought I'd get an USB flash drive with lots of memory and start transferring away. ... I didn't want to buy one without a brand name of some sort listed. So there were some cute sleek ones, but no brand name. ...In the end, ...I only paid about 9 bucks. I got one that is black with some green on it and is also waterproof because I like to sit at my computer desk and drool excessively and sometimes randomly throw water at stuff. Oh, and this brand (Adata, which I've never heard of and my brother will probably write and tell me it's the worst in the universe) had a much cuter one in black and orange and I like orange better than green, but the green one was cheaper.”
In the comment section of that post was the following:
Sheldon said... I've had Adata stuff - should be fine.
Cue the dramatic music indicating some ironic doom is impending. That Fall we continued putting our photos on the drive. Then in that next spring, about a year after buying it, the flash drive that had been cute, sleek and green was still green. However it was neither cute nor sleek. There was a virus that had corrupted the drive and most of the data that had been saved was inaccessible. But not to worry the data was still on my computer. By the way if you reread the March 15th we still had Rachel's computer that was slow and had next to no memory space on it.
At the beginning of April we got a hold of my friend Chris in the Math department. He was able to reconstruct the majority of the photos from the flash drive and put them on a CD. Then out of the blue the monitor on Rachel's computer fried and the mother board of MY computer fried. But the data was still on the hard drive. No sweat. So we decided to get a new computer and we transfered everything from the two older hard drives and the CD over to the new computer. Over the next eight months Rachel's slow computer sat in the closet, my broken computer sat in Chris' office and our lovely new computer sat at our desk. We had been meaning to back up the data on the computer, but there really wasn't much to worry about. All the data was one one of those computer. And what could happen. Cue the next dramatic music indicating more ironic doom is impending.
We went to visit family up north over Christmas and our apartment was broken into. They were targeting electronics. They took our new computer and my ipod. Very upsetting, but at the same time not that much to worry about because we still have the hard drives from the old computers, right?
Fast forward another eight months. We just got a new laptop so it is time once again to back up the photos and get them together. Ideally we would like to recover all the photos. But there are specific groups of photos like Engagement pictures, Wedding pictures and Honeymoon picture. Well the Engagement pictures and Wedding pictures were all accounted for. However we took a little over 400 photos during our honeymoon and they were not together in the same place. Mostly because as we were sight seeing Rachel and I had separate cameras. The CD reconstruction of the no-so-cute-not-so-sleek flash drive turned up about two thirds of the photos. The obvious place to find the missing photos was the hard drive of my old computer with the busted mother board. We just transfer the data over to the new computer. No problem right? The plot thickens yet again. Back up to when we first bought the computer that ended up stolen, just before the mother board fried. The new computer was set up and all the data was transferred. I asked Chris if we could set up my old computer with a new installation of Window for a back up. He said sure, he reinstalled windows and boom that was when the mother board fried.That's why it had been sitting in his office for months and months. Back to today we access the hard drive and the memory has been erased. A third of the honeymoon photos are just gone.
So I am about cover my self in ash and wail to to the heavens. But then enter the heroes of our story, Jeff and Nic, the tech guys from the top floor of the math building. The very last thing that had been done to the hard drive was a re-installation of Windows. Up to that point the data had been there. If the computer had been in use all the time the data would be completely gone. But there is software out there that can reconstruct data that has been wiped, provided it hasn't been written over. Well the new copy of Windows had been installed. My only hope was that the part of the data that had been wiped out by that was some old saved game of Roller Coaster Tycoon and not the scenery of North Carolina.
After some time they had reconstructed a ton of pictures. The first run turned up most of the missing photos about 90%. They checked again and there was record of all the photos was took 410 in all of which 401 were either on the new computer, or accessed by the old computer. That's a 98% recovery. Pretty incredible if you think about it. The big question was what were those 9 remaining photos. Eight of those photos that would have been flowers or arches or staircases in Bildmore. And honestly we have dozens of photos of those exact flowers and archways just at different angles and such. If that's all that is missing not bad. However when driving through the mountains we had asked a random fellow tourist if she would take our photo with the Mountains in the background. The 9th and last missing photo was that one. That is what you would call an irreplaceable photo. Now I will note that picture is on Rachel's blog. But it is the resized cropped picture. It isn't the original. Not too bad, but still.
Now what does any of that have to do with Iguanas? Well I'll tell you. Just before the cute and sleek flash drive became the not-so-cute-not-so-sleek flash drive Rachel's former room mate Bethany came to visit. It was in November '08 right before Thanksgiving. Jump ahead a little over a year to January of 2010 when we just had our computer stolen. We had some old memory cards that had pictures on them. The earliest of which were from that trip. We decided back those pictures up. During that trip they went to a nature sanctuary. They took this photo:
As I mentioned Chris reconstructed the no-so-cute-not-so-sleek flash drive we got a ton of pictures including THIS photo:
Nic and Jeff did a great job reconstructing the hard drive. Like I said 98% recovery on the honeymoon pictures. They also got a bunch of other pictures including THIS PHOTO:
I mean it is a nice looking Iguana. But really if we never sow THAT photo again would we even remember it. And the fact that we three original sized un-cropped copies of the same Iguana. But only a resized cropped picture of us in the mountains. We would gladly trade all three of these Iguana pictures for that one shot.
But the story is not quite over. This morning I stopped by Nic's office to see how the recovery turned out. He found a bunch more pictures including THIS PHOTO!!!!
Yes that is the one. I can say at this point 100% recovery on the honeymoon photos. I mean I'll have to check for those flowers and archways. But in terms of what's important, we've got'm. Good job guys.
