One of my worst nightmares has come true. My external hard disk can't be booted up. This is horrible. It's a disaster that goes beyond "oh crap".

1) All my ministry related data is in there. Minutes, programmes, plans, proposals, schedules, records, you name it, I used to have it.
2) All my pictures are in there. Especially for YF over the years 2002-2006. Some are scanned pics and possibly not recoverable since the original prints have vanished. Some are pics I've collected from other people over time. Some are pictures of friends outside church, whom I kinda lost contact with. But it's all gone now.
3) All my photoshop experiments were in there. The source files...gone.
4) All my MP3s. I still have a fraction of them on my iPod, but the bulk of them are in there, especially my treasured horde of sound effects. It's going to be a real pain to rip them from my CDs again.
5) The YFwebsites are gone. The previous YF one, the current YF one and the new YF one that I was planning. I can still save the current YF one since I have copies of it on an external server, but the rest were the only copies I ever had of them. Ouch.
6) My videos were in there. All the camp videos, and the mission trip video I did. Not just the .avi files. Even the source files were in there.

I'm still kind of in denial mode. I'm desperately hoping that after a day's rest the hard disk will work again. I've got at least 80 gig's worth of data in there. Starting over again seems really really daunting.

I need an ice cream.

posted by NEB at 3:50 PM

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