Pity Party for me.
Our external hard drive, where we store ALL of our pictures (and the scrapbook pages I have spent hours on) and all of our videos, including heirloom pictures that we scanned in and no longer have access too, FAILED. It is a mechanical issue. (most likely a spindle motor failure…sad thing is, the very first Google result when you type in the problem is our exact drive.) The data is most likely still there, but it costs between $1200 – $2500 to recover it and nobody does it locally. The cheapest we have found so far is a place where we would pay to send the drive to them for them to diagnose how much it will be and charge us $65 just to tell us what the total bill would be.
Zach has been looking for a way to fix it, but so far, it looks like it requires a clean room/anti-static room to work on it, so it probably isn’t something we can do ourselves, especially since the data is so precious to us.
I have been sick for days. My fever returned about an hour ago, which means that my once a month, MUCH needed mom’s night out (autism support group meeting) is out. I haven’t been able to go to the gym for over 2 weeks now due to illness. We have no insurance (for the adults) since dh lost his job. We have very little money.
I am so sad. There are are around 15,000 pictures on there, not including the scanned photos, videos, and scrapbook pages.
I know there are worse things, but this sucks.
Any advice on data recovery related stuff would be welcome.
I wish I had some sort of magical external hard drive fixing advice for you. Actually, our back hard drive also recently failed, but very lucky for us, it was just what we use to back up all of our other computers. After that, Mark decided to both back up stuff locally (in the house with a new hard drive) and look into a monthly service to back up our stuff off-site (in case of a fire or something like that). I don’t think he’s actually done it yet, but that’s the plan. Anyway, I will keep my fingers crossed that a cheaper option presents itself.
And, I’m so sorry you are both missing your night out and being able to go to the gym. (((JenniferZ)))
Love is being sent you way, I hope that things start looking up for all of you soon.