Searching...

I've been going through lots of old Hebrides photos over the last few weeks, searching out entries for an online photo competition I decided to enter. It's been good fun - so often the temptation is to take the shots, then post some on here, maybe get them printed into a photo book, but then just leave them gathering virtual dust on a hard drive. what a shame this is, and how much I would mourn some of these old shots if they were lost, was brought home to me recently.

Having taken the decision to replace the rather tired, never-worked-terribly-well laptop while there was still a wheezing semblance of life left in it, it naturally followed that the Desktop PC decided to die a few weeks later. There was a slightly worrying whine, a sort of whirring noise, and then the machine quietly shut itself down. I think it was quite a peaceful death, however it did leave us with a quandary. I'm pretty good at backing up photos - stuff from the laptop gets copied to the external hard drive, things get duplicated from machine to machine, and everything of any particular personal value (Hebrides stuff in particular) gets kept on memory cards, too. I did realise at that stage though that I am more shoddy than I should be about backups for other things. More vital things, some might say, like work records and my tax spreadsheet. That sort of thing. For the last 6 weeks or so it's felt as though EVERY file I've wanted has been on the hard-drive from the old machine. The inaccessible hard drive. There has been foot-stamping. Finally this week we got around to ordering the bit of kit that would enable us to access everything again, and this has lead to much going through old pics, remembering back to old holidays and the things we did.

The shot above was taken on Benbecula, the year I first started playing with Canon's bundled editing software and discovered "Photostitch" - a surprisingly good panorama creating. There were a good number of pano shots taken that year! It was the first year we spent a full fortnight up there too, so lots and lots of photos!

Oh, and lesson learnt - the first job when we got access to the old hard drive? To copy everything across to the new machine, of course!

Robyn