So, if you weren’t following My Evil Twit-ter today, you don’t know that all of my photos (about 20,000 total) were accidentally deleted last night whilst I slept tucked up in my cozy bed. Ask Zan if you want to know the gory details, but *something* happened, and all of my photos went *PFFFT* They were wiped out on both my internal drive, and my external backup drive. I was oblivious until I went to get on my computer this morning, and this screen was up that said “recovering files.” The files listed were all my photo files. I *did* manage to remain somewhat calm, since the operative word was “recovering.” Zan explained when he got up that, yes indeed, all my photos had been erased, but he was fixing the problem. Since he can fix anything, I had faith. About half an hour ago, the program stopped running and claimed that all the files had been recovered…I checked, and yes they have been. They all appear to be there. *crossing fingers*
I feel REALLY sorry for my poor husband, who I’m sure was on the verge of a heart attack when he realized what had happened. Even I wouldn’t want to face me to tell me that all my photos were gone. That had to have been a scary, dark hour….poor thing! *tee*hee*
So now I’m left wondering, what am I supposed to do? How do you insure your digital photos against loss? We backup the backup, but obviously, even that isn’t 100% safe. What do you all do to save your photos?
Oh, and for those interested, the program he used is called “DiskInternals Uneraser.” I hope you never have need of it.
A Half Hour a Day 
Any idea WHAT happened?? How odd that they would get erased from the computer and external hard drive. I’m so glad that you could get them all back!!
I burn mine to DVDs, although not as often as I should!!
Although I don’t nearly have the number of photos that you have, I store my photos on Picasa Web Albums. They have a huge amount of storage for free. I also make prints and keep them in old fashioned photo albums; if there is ever an older photo that I cannot find digitally stored anywhere, I can scan the photo to use it again.
Does Picasa upload fairly quickly Karma?
DVDs of each month, for me.
I don’t have near that many photos, but at the end of each week, I upload them to (gasp!) Wal-Mart. Originally, it was simply to print copies of my kids’ pictures, but when our house burned, I didn’t lose hardly any pictures because they are stored on that server indefinitely.
Welcome Tracie! It’s always fun when new people comment! 🙂
Thanks for the advice. I was using Shutterfly for awhile, but it took so long to upload. I keep my favorites to share out over at Flickr. Maybe I will look into this idea further.