The price of sentimental value

Hearing:

My lovely, beautiful, easy-to-use, convienient Western Digital MyBook 500GB external hard drive has turned into a vicious monster and ripped my heart out.

It has died and taken all my flying/travel photos and small video clips with it. I spent the whole weekend just researching on the net of ways i could get it to work and trying everything i could...no luck. The only thing that can work at this stage is professional data recovery which attracts one hell of a price tag. Yesterday i was quoted $3500. And yes i did cry.

I just dont have that kind of money. It would take me close to a year to save up that much. That seems to be the price of photos with sentimental value. And to all those who are just itching to say "you should have made back ups" let me just say screw you! Dont you think i know that? The external WAS my back up and even so i had bought some blank dvds during the week to back it up this weekend.

Ahem. Sorry. Clearly im still upset about it. Its not easy. I have some earlier photos on cds but the past year of flying and travel are just on the external and frankly it hurts a lot. And the data recovery people cant guarantee that they can get everything back cuz the topple might have caused the heads to go out of alignment and scratch the surface. Its really depressing and some people might not understand, yeah you have your memories but a photo is really worth so much. Some of my favourites are on there including one of me in the engine of one of my ex-companies aircrafts.

Im now looking at another company which might cost a bit less and they can at least tell me if my photos survived before i fork out. I still have to wait to save a bit though otherwise they charge me for keeping my data with them if i cant pay the full amount up front.

*sigh*

The price of sentimental value... :(

VP