Wish me luck!

So the other day, I was working on my computer upstairs and I came downstairs for a few things. When I went back upstairs, my external hard drive was on the floor and making a weird noise. Yea. This is THE hard drive. I look around and I see an orange streak downstairs. Oh. No. Kill cat later. So I go and check it out. Its making this god awful noise and I try to access it. Nothing. There is no drive registering. You are kidding me. I restart the computer. Like 5 times. Nothing. Everytime I turn on the drive, it clicks a few times and just keeps running. In other words, its broken. My 500GB hard drive with everything on it is broken. Ok, so I'm not completely stupid. I've put most of the stuff to DVD's and CD's. Most of it. Like 85% of it. I haven't gotten to the rest. The rest means 3 weddings, all of my sittings for the last year, and all of Ava's pictures from the last two years. Thats the one that makes me want to cry. So after a freak out, I had to go to a wedding and try to pretend like this wasn't happening to me. I called everyone I knew and asked them to pray. Todd took the hard drive in to the Geek Squad and there was good news and bad news. The good news is, they can get everything off of it. The bad news is, it will cost about $1500.00 and it will take about 3 weeks. Awesome. So I reassess. The weddings are from about 6 months ago. The brides and grooms already have their pictures, so they shouldn't need anything for a while. The sittings are all done as well, with the exception of my good friend's sisters newborn twins. I was supposed to give her a CD with them. I told her she may have to wait a bit. And all the Ava pictures? Well, luckily I put most of the best of the best on a portable drive for Todd's dad. We have it back now, so at least I have those. Up to maybe 6 months ago. The rest, I have either on my laptop here or in various other places. Ok. So, I can breathe. Well, today, Todd and I are going up to my brother's house, Dave, to see if he can do anything with the drive. He used to be the supervisor for the Geek Squad and now he works as tech support for his church. So, I'm hoping he can do something. Maybe I can forego the $1500 bill and the 3 week wait. I can only pray for a miracle. If this doesn't work, I'll have to fork over the money. Ugh. I don't even want to think about it.

Moral of the story: Always back up. Always, always, always.