Don't forget to make a backup of your photos.

My holidays are over so I am back on the ship again. This means also that I am back here at Ipernity :)

I had a terrible experience just before I left Vancouver. I usually take allot of photos of my family and some other photos while I have holidays, and the only thing I do with these photos while I am at home is to download them into my computer. I do that so I am not spending too much time in front of the computer editing photos while I am with my family.

The same day as my holidays were over I wanted to copy everything to my external hard drive so I could take it with me to the ship, but my computer did not start. I did not have much time, so I took my computer in a hurry in for repair, only to find out that my hard disk was dead. I was told that there was nothing they could do to try to retrieve my photos from that disk. I knew that these photos were nothing special, but as soon as I found out I could not get them back I felt sick in my stomach. I felt like someone had died. The technician I was talking to probably saw how upset I got so he told me that I did not have to worry because the computer was under warranty. I didn’t care less about the computer; I only wanted my photos back.

After talking to this technician for a while I told him that I did not believe that some computer specialist could not get my photos back. I asked him to fix my computer but I told him I wanted my old disk back, because I was going to take it to someone who knew something about computers. He told me that I could not get the hard drive because the computer was under manufactures warranty so they had to send the drive back to HP.

After carefully choosing some nice word to say about how capable I thought they were, I stormed out with my computer in my hand. One year earlier I had a bad experience at this same store so I told them I would never buy anything from them again because they did not know what they were doing. When I came out of the store I realized I had forgotten I was on my motorcycle. My wife had followed me on our car to the store with the computer, but she had already left. I tried to drive the motorcycle with the computer in my arms but it was impossible.

I went back to the store to ask if they could hold on to my computer while I got my car. I felt a little bit embarrassed to ask because I did not behave very nicely when I left. I was pleased when someone that I had not shouted at asked if he could help me. I told him what had happened earlier and the reason why I was so upset. I also told him that I had changed my mind about taking the computer to someone else, so I asked him to fix it for me. I would pay for it thought it was under warranty because I wanted my hard drive back. He told me that while the computer was under warranty it was their job to try to retrieve what was on the disk before they replaced it. He asked if he could try to retrieve my photos before he did anything else. It was not difficult for me to say “yes please try that” :)

I got a phone call half an hour later from that same man. He told me I could come and pick up my computer because he had already fixed it. There were two 250GB hard drives in this computer and the drive that was dead had nothing on it. I can’t describe how happy I was. I know very well that there were only photos on that drive, taken in a period of one month, but I don’t want to loose any of my photos :) When I drove home after picking up my computer I decided that from now on I would defiantly back up everything more often :-) I wonder for how long I will remember to do that :-) I think I just got lucky this time :)