R is for "Retrieval"

Retrieval....or Redemption, I suppose. Today I discovered a wonderful thing.

Let's start at the beginning, shall we?

Four days ago, our young puppy, incredibly excited at the
prospect of chasing our cat (and completely unaware of her ever-increasing size), got tangled in a very important cord as she raced across the room. One end of the cord was hooked into my fiance's computer. The other end (ohhhhh, the other end) was attached to our 500GB backup hard drive, sitting on the side table.

Backup hard drive. Containing precisely that. Backups (appproximately 300 GB worth) of everything under the sun that is - was - of any importance to us. Movies, music, school work from the last three years of teaching, university files, and the most devastating of all, 8 years of photo shooting.

Photography is our hobby, and apparently we're quite good. When we realized that the hard drive no longer functioned, I literally almost threw up. Although we had just made a succulent dinner of honey-glazed salmon and salad, I didn't eat a bite that night. I couldn't. I was sick at the thought of all my photos, gone. Lost to the land of broken technology.

We spent hours looking on the internet for ways to fix our problem. There seemed to be only possible solution...sending our precious hard drive to a 'data retrieval' company in Toronto. For the low, low price of $800-1600, they will repair and retrieve whatever they possibly can from our drive. Although they have assured us that their retrieval rates are quite high, I'm still resigned to the fact that all is lost. After all, their success rate is only around 90%. It's still possible they won't be able to get our data back. At least we won't have to pay if they can't fix it.

Nonetheless, I'm praying to the Gods of Technology to return my beloved photos to me.

Back to today. My wonderful experience of 'retrieval'. I bought a new camera this weekend. It's a Pentax Optio W30. It's waterproof and dustproof, which should come in handy during our honeymoon through the desert and Big Sur in March. I was testing it out, and after downloading the pictures onto my computer, I realized that there was another folder present on my 2GB SD card. It was called "Pic Show."

No, I thought. It can't be.

But it was. In this folder was 400 of our best photos from the summer, as well as a few random good shots from the last couple of years. The picture show that we'd put together at the end of August in order to show our parents the highlights of our summer travels through Riding Mountain National Park, Regina, Moose Jaw, Dinosaur Provincial Park, Calgary, Lake Louise, Glacier National Park, Kelowna, and back to Toronto. What a find!

And so....Retrieval. A redemption of sorts. All is not lost. Well, I guess most of the photos still are.

But I guess I should look on the bright side. It's better than nothing, right?