I thought I was…

I store all my digital pictures on an Acomdata external hard drive. The reason I do this is because I’ve had the same home desktop computer for about 6 years, but I’ve had to ‘nuke’ it 3 or 4 times to get it back to pristine condition.

Well today I was going to download my latest batch of pictures from my camera to my external drive when I discovered that my computer no longer ’saw’ it as connected. I checked the power and USB cables, both plugged in. The unit’s lights were on with no warnings. I tried doing some device manager mojo but that didn’t work.

I googled the problem and found a helpful DIY approach. The solutions call for taking the unit apart and either hooking it up directly to your PC (I’ve done some computer component moving, installing and what-not, so I’m comfortable with this), or buying an identical unit and swapping the drive of the old one into the casing of the new one. If those fail, they suggest a data recovery firm….

Well I sent off for some tiny little instruments (anyone else just think of the Seinfeld squirrel?) to take apart the drive and I managed to find the exact model I have. I bought it and it’ll be here in a few days.

Frankly I’m a little nervous that I’ll lose over 5 years of pictures. I really wish I had used an online backup service. And you can bet I will after this….

If all else fails, I will probably spend about $2,000 on a company called Drive Savers. They claim to be able to save just about any data (fire, water damage, smashed), so we’ll see….

IMO the 5,000 or so pictures are worth the money to save. But as soon as I can access these pics, I promise I’ll buy one or two of the following services:

• iBackup
• Carbonite
• Mozy