I once heard one of those groaner jokes that went like this:

What did the priest say to the student who lost his 10 page paper after a power outage?

Jesus Saves!

We’ve all heard this before, but I am here to urge you to listen to this advice before you lose everything you have.

If you’re like me, you love your media collection. You might spend hours making playlists, organizing your photo library, and uploading funny pictures to facebook. Over the years, the music and photos I’ve accumulated have taken up the vast majority of my computer’s memory space, making it inconveniently slow. But when I started to store video files, my computer, (named Darling), just crashed.  I recently decided that enough was enough.  I decided to get tech-saavy and bought a 500GB portable external harddrive (named Kiki – after Kiki’s Delivery Service), and moved all of my multi-media. I also used Kiki to back up everything on Darling.

The only thing is I never backed up all the media that I had moved onto the harddrive (dumb mistake number one). The technical ogre that I am, and too stressed out by the 12 page paper that I had only just started and needed to finish that night, I forgot to safely eject the harddrive before taking my laptop away (number two). The next time I started iphoto, all of my pictures were completely gone! Years worth of thousands of pictures, of which some older ones were uploaded online but the newest ones had not yet been stored anywhere else.

I know that I probably shouldn’t tether my life experiences to those pictures, but I still feel like my entire past has been lifted from underneath my feet, that all twenty years have suddenly been robbed from my memory.

Please learn from my misfortune:

• always take the extra ten seconds to eject your disks safely
• back up your harddrive, and your external harddrives
• periodically upload all pictures online just in case (plus it gives you an excuse to procrastinate on facebook)
• don’t be too dependent on technology (I usually tend to distrust it). develop pictures that you really care about.

I stayed up all night last night writing a 12 page paper, and now I have another paper that I’m supposed to write due at 9:15 tomorrow. I haven’t started, but feel too upset and preoccupied to start. What’s one night and one essay compared to an entire life, gone?

2/2/3

Update: OMG I just randomly tried something and I found my photos! I love myself!  I can’t believe I figured it out all by myself! I feel like a little three year old who just learned some easy task, and now thinks she is the smartest person in the world (In fact lots of three year olds are probably better at using technology than I am). All you computer people out there are probably rolling your eyes and thinking that it was such a easy problem. (Heh <== most technologically inept person in the world right here). I am going to run around my house telling everyone about how proud they should be of me! Now I have the energy boost to finish that paper!

7/2/3 Biggest mood swing ever

Update: Finished the paper at 3am. Finally, some SLEEP!

In case this has happens to you, I will post below a detailed description of how to solve it. Don’t read ahead unless really interested —-

The problem: What happened was that iphoto was still running while I removed the hard drive, so the next time iphoto opened and pointed to the library file, it just opened a blank library. Even though my library file was unharmed and still contained all my pictures, the iphoto program was accessing it inaccurately. The problem was compounded by the fact that I use time machine, so I had multiple copies of the iphoto library stored on the external hard drive and in the end couldn’t decipher which was the correct one. Also, I moved various iphotos to and from the trash so often that everything was mixed up.

The solution: I used a program called Grand Perspective to scan my computer and show graphically what files were taking up how much space. I saw large squares representing several different iphoto libraries, but one of them was much larger than the rest. (In case you don’t know, iphoto library is a file that brings all your photos together, it is not a folder with separate jpeg files for each photo). When I opened them, however, all of them came up blank. How can a blank iphoto library have two different sizes? I was convinced that the large one was the culprit. It was storing all my photos but redirecting to a more recent library upon opening. What did the trick was to copy the library to my comuter, eject the hard drive (so that whatever library iphoto was referencing was not accessible), open up iphoto, and manually select the desired library. It worked!

Wow. I feel like Sherlock Holmes.