14/365: The Culprit

I don't need any help messing up things. I keep so many balls in the air, it doesn't take much for me to bobble or drop one. Yesterday a big one bounced. I downloaded the weekend's photos from my camera and was getting ready to post them in the blog entries I had written. The download went fine. I deleted them from my camera. I organized them into photos on my flashdrive. (I keep them on my flashdrive because I don't want to keep personal items on my work computer.) I signed into blogger, hit the photo icon and there was NOTHING on the flashdrive. I unplugged it and put it back in the port. I tried a different port. I restarted my computer. I tried my laptop. Nope, nothing. I waited and tried again after lunch. I emailed IT and they tried their voodoo on it. I even tried freezing it (Klucker's idea, don't ask) and trying it on my home machine. Play the funeral dirge, it has passed.

So what did I lose and why didn't I have this junk backed up? (Good questions) Well, several years ago, I diversified with my flash drives. I have, strike that, had a home, work, Team Rev, former job, and miscellaneous drive. My theory was that I could take everything with me, not get files confused, and would always be ready to go. Ooops. It was my home drive that bonked. It had photos, lots of them. Many of them recovered and recreated from when our home computer crashed last year. That being the reason most of this wasn't backed up...it was my back up. I lost my Christmas card list and address labels. Gone is my resume and digital copies of letters of reference. I know there is other data that was on there that I lost as well. I won't realize what it is until I need it.

I can't bring myself to toss the offending drive just yet. I'm holding out hope that I'll pop it in a port in a few days, weeks, and magically everything will be there. We should all have dreams. Until that miracuously happens, I'm trying something recommended by one of my favorite techies, Drop Box. It's a cloud storage system that automatically syncs to every machine on which you install it. Don't worry, I'll back it up.