Mense horribilis!! Or “I wish I had backed up my photos earlier!!”

Three weeks ago, just before Celine and I went off for a nine-day trip to Utah’s National Parks I decided it was about time I backed up our travelling photo library HDD, one of my main sources of inspiration when writing my travel blogs. My goodness me, can you imagine what I felt as each photo file therein declared itself corrupted and unreadable??!!

First thought . . . use the Apple file mending software – useless. Then take the drive to a couple of local electronics stores; the first one which advertises itself as an Apple Specialist, couldn’t help as they didn’t even have an Apple computer with the latest OS, and the second declared the drive to be so seriously damaged it was in need of the services of a “specialised clean laboratory”.

So my fifteen years or so of digital photography is now in the hands of Kroll OnTrak.com and I am holding my breath as I wait to find out if they are able to recover enough to warrant the four figure cost of their services. A few prayers might be useful too, though somehow my years of agnosticism may mean they’ll go unanswered. Still everything’s worth trying!!

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Taran

Born into a middle-class English family, Taran was educated at a minor UK public-school and graduated from Imperial College, London as a mechanical engineer. He worked variously as a marine engineer, a marine surveyor, a company owner and as an industrial accidents investigator. He is a family man although now divorced from the mother of his two sons. He has travelled the world extensively, often as part of his employment, but also many times simply for the pleasure of experiencing new countries their cultures and their people. As well as calling England his home for much of his life, he is also a citizen of Canada where he lived for seventeen years and has had homes in Nigeria and Kuwait. Now retired, he lives in California, happily married to his second wife, and close to both his sons and his grandchildren. He continues to travel as often as possible and is enjoying his dream of becoming a writer.

2 thoughts on “Mense horribilis!! Or “I wish I had backed up my photos earlier!!””

  1. For goodness sake dear boy! Sounds like a disaster. You must feel awful. Let’s hope Kroll Ontrack can fix it for you. I back up mine every month onto another disk and have cloud storage. With an annual Office 365 licence you are given 1TB of free cloud storage. The licence is for up to 5 people and costs around $90 here. Each of the five users gets all the Microsoft Office programs (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Publisher etc) plus each gets 1TB of storage. That’s less than $20 per year each….. a bargain.

    1. Thanks for the suggestion. I am an Apple man myself and am looking into some form of cloud storage. Still waiting for news from Kroll.

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