I Think I'm Going to Be Sick...

You know that gut feeling that you get when you know you've screwed up? And how it gets worse the more you attempt to fix or as every new attempt to fix doesn't just fail, each attempt shows that the failure was worse than you initially thought it was. (<- Nasty, run-on sentence! Small attempt at levity.) Well, I've got that feeling. Actually, I've had that feeling since 2PM today.

Around 2PM I was feeling pretty good about the progress I had made in organizing some new photos and in re-organizing the old ones. But then I looked at one of the links in the old blog sidebar "Pictures of Christian" - as it was on the old site. (You're probably noticing that the link is not here anymore...) I decided that I should go ahead and make sure that all those older and already published photos had made it into Picasa. And that's when I noticed that first thumbnail dated around 04-08-2004 that had no equivalent in my saved photos on this computer - the feeling hit. I took no time in going to the old hosting site (now only available via this IP address) and downloading each and every photo. I started looking for matches and what became more and more worrisome was the growing number of non-matches. I ended up with almost 200 thumbnails (from the previous site) that don't match and cannot be found anywhere on this computer. Judging by the names of the thumbnails and how some numbers in sequences are skipped, I figured that I was really missing 250 - 300 photos.

Ok. That's bad, but not the end of the world, I thought. I was thinking I had backups in three or four places - my desktop at work, the private backup folder in "My Documents" stored on the RainGard server, a folder on my home server, the full laptop backups on my home 320GB external drive, my smaller but more recent backups onto my NSLU2 server at home, or at worse case even on my old iPod. (Heh, make that five or six places!) So I felt bad, but I felt like I had odds on chances of finding the photos. I first checked the desktop folder where I kept daily backups for the longest time - hmmm, I must have deleted the whole backup folder that last time I had to restore my drive. Phooey! Ok, check the private folder on RainGard's server - hmmm, I must have stopped making that backup because of the amount of disk space I was using - needless to say I deleted the backup as well... Doh! I got home and checked the folder on my home server - nope, that backup pretty well matches my current photo folder, meaning that backup is a post-2nd death and resurrection of this laptop backup. Dagnabbit. Of course, the feeling started to get worse. I wanted to check the iPod but couldn't because it has a firewire interface and only the desktop at work has firewire. I fired up the "sometimes works, sometimes doesn't" 320GB external drive at home and promptly found out that the full laptop backups were made with IBM Rescue and Recovery v2 - of which backups cannot be read by the Lenovo Rescue and Recovery v3.10 on the laptop now. UGGHHH! It was now time for the wedding rehearsal so this bad feeling just had to wait.

After the wedding rehearsal, we headed to Top of the River to eat. (Christian is the ring bearer and at three years old, I'm not sure what to expect out of him tomorrow seeing how *well* his part in the rehearsal went tonight... Note to self: Set expectations really low and I can only be happy at what happens!) What a meal at Top of the River! My thanks to the groom's father! That was excellent and fun. And a needed respite from the day's events...

I decided I'd stop back by work and check out the iPod backup to see if the photos might be there. Carp! Nada, nothing, not a thing. But Hey! My old IBM Rescue and Recovery CD - a bootable one at that *and* it should be able to read the backups on the 320GB drive at home. I hurried home and booted up the RnR and what can I say, I'm shooting 100% on this thing. Every backup is POST 1st death of the laptop - which is to say that nothing of worth was there. Auuuuuggggh.

Oh, and didn't I say earlier that it got worse? I didn't? Well, I should have. You see, I was able to find the catalog file from the Adobe Photoshop Album that I had been using, and I installed the latest starter edition of Adobe Photoshop Album to look through it. That bad feeling, oh yeah, it's really bad right now. I found that not only did I only have those ~200 thumbnails of images that I published from the time period of March 2004 through May 2004. I found that I'm also missing photos from (and I'm really guessing here) around August 2003 through May 2004. Yes, I really want to go puke now. It's hard to even type that. The first eight months of my son's life! I know I was taking 30-40 pictures a week sometimes! Oh, puh-lease just let me puke - if only that would take away this feeling.

I had to take a break there. If not just to catch my breath, to take care of Christian. He might have caught something earlier tonight. He's got a bit of fever and was crying out as the fever started to break. That does at least give some reality to this - that the here and now is much more important that the mistake(s) or even personal triumphs of the past. I do feel some better just after writing all this. Like pouring out my angst (only a few people read this, thank goodness!) gives a little relief too. I honestly have no idea / earthly clue what happened to cause so many pictures to go *poof*. EVERY single backup looked exactly the same as my current "My Pictures" setup. I can only guess that the first laptop death, where I knew I had lost some financial work and etc., must have taken away all those pictures and I just didn't realize it because I hadn't been organizing or publishing photos in a while. Bleh!

I should say that I do have one last hope on the missing pictures: Christy's iMac. Most all of those earlier digital photos correspond to the time before I got my own digital camera (the Dimage Xg). And Christy had uploaded most of her photos to the iMac. Unfortunately, her iMac currently has a PSU problem - something which AppleCare Suppost said will require us taking it to an Apple service center to have it fixed. I guess that project / to do item just got high priority! (Please, please, let the photos be there!)

I'm off to bed...

PS. I just made a local copy of the existing My Pictures folder (at least what images I have now will have current backups!)