Storms and Broken Hearts

This past weekend saw a lot of destruction across Brisbane as five supercell storms raged through Southeast Queensland. I think this was one of the images of Brisbane during the day time while one of the storms struck. I've copied this photo from one of the newspapers.

Even with the threat of storms, my weekend started in an awesome way with the Tap Dogs concert. I took Aaron and Adrian and they sat still, and mesmerized, for 90 minutes. It was a fantastic!

The weekend sort of went flat after that because of the threat of storms. We just stayed home. I have surge protectors for the computers but the storms were so fierce that I didn't want to risk being online during the storms. I've had two previous modems/routers fried by storms before.

We were at home for four of the storms but I didn't notice the fifth one coming and we were out on the roads when day turned to night in five minutes and it started hailing on us. Thankfully, we managed to squeeze in with a bunch of other cars under an overpass. We were on the roads because I was on my way clogging but obviously, I didn't make it there and went sulking home.

It was at home that the big drop of the weekend came. When I finally got on the computer again, I thought I'd go do a backup of my photos. This is something I do regularly because my most precious possessions are these photos of my children. Guess what? I made the horrible discovery that all, ALL, the photos from 2011 were missing. I tried to contain my panic as I looked through the 4 external hard drives that I own. I initially thought that all photos prior to 2012 were gone. I managed to find some photos from 2010 but the last few months of 2010 were missing. So in total, I'm missing 16 months of photos. Don't ask me how this happened - I have no idea. I can't say it wasn't me but I can't be sure about that either.

You can't (or maybe you can) imagine the heartbreak this caused. Visualise a heart with cracks all through it because I was trying to contain the panic and then when I double and triple confirmed that the photos were nowhere to be found, just imagine that heart crumbling to bits. I couldn't get to sleep that night.

Eventually, I found some consolation in my phone. The same phone that I berated Richard for giving me for my birthday. The same phone that I said I would never need. Well, one day, several months ago, I accidentally did some sync with all my Google accounts and it has all the photos that I've ever posted Picasa web albums, including those missing ones. I always thought those photos were somehow from my PC and it wasn't until this disaster that I worked out they were from Picasa. I also remember wanting to delete it from the web albums because I'm running out of space but I hadn't gotten around to it yet. So, I have some photos - not a lot, but enough for me to remember what Adrian looked like during these adorable toddler months.

I've been spending my time, saving these photos back onto my unreliable PC hard disk and will then be carefully copying them onto one or more of my external hard disks and eventually, I will be making a photo book out of them so that I have a hard copy. All the copying and pasting has been a healing process and I am no longer depressed and grumpy now.

So the moral of the story is not just to backup but to check your backups.