So I’m still waiting to hear about my computer. Apparently there’s some kind of computer crashing epidemic going around (which I’m sure Kate brought home from daycare) so there’s a long wait at the computer hospital. In the meantime, I’m trying to stay hopeful, but preparing for the worst. What if none of my pictures can be recovered?!
Okay, here’s the state of pictures of the child that resulted from the G&D union: I have about 200 from Kate’s first year saved to a flash drive from when I was putting together her 1st birthday slideshow. After that, I have a handful of photos uploaded online that capture Kate from months 12-16. Since the crash, I’ve been focusing on all the photos I didn‘t have backed up that will be lost forever if my data isn’t recovered. Hundreds of images come to mind–pictures from the hospital when Kate was born, pictures with her grandparents, facial expressions that only a 3 month old can make, her first Christmas…and as difficult as they are for us to look at, pictures from Kate’s surgery and subsequent recovery. It breaks my heart to think these snapshots of her life are lost forever.
Then again, how many pictures do I need?
I think about G’s mom, for example, who has just one picture of herself as an infant. ONE. Kate is only 16 months old, but I already have thousands of pictures of her so far. Honestly, thousands.
After Kate’s first birthday I started grouping her photographs into folders by age and then narrowing them down to my favorites. I started with the goal of keeping 50 photos per month, but quickly found that goal increasing from 50 photos to 100…then 150…and in some months even 200.
200 photos per month!
Do I really need 17 photos of Kate eating spaghetti for the first time?
Do I even need one??
Maybe I’m just mentally preparing myself for the worst, but these are the questions I ponder as I wonder if Kate’s photographs are gone forever.
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
I just did a quick check on my computer and my twins (13 months) have well over 1200 pictures of them… and that’s with me trying so hard to edit them down to a reasonable number. In the last 2 weeks alone, I have taken 75 pictures of them. Yikes. Not to mention the hundreds of 30 second videos I’ve recorded of their developments.
Is it necessary? Definitely no. Is it so fun? Absolutely yes. My husband shakes his head at me, but I can’t help myself…
I have more than 5,000 easy of my 5 year old and more than 1,000 easy of my 12 week old. Yesyou do need 25 shots of the same thing, you never know when you may want to go back. We back our hard drive up, in addition burn disks every couple of months. We gave very few pics of my grandmother and it makes us sad. So we pic overload… Better to have too many than not enough. Keep a hopeful heart- I’ve been through 7 blue screens on my pc and 1 black on my Mac and everything was pretty much recovered. They can fix it! They have too! Good luck!
As I sort through 700+ pics from our vacation I asked myself the same questions. It seems excessive and makes me wish for a film camera!
Bah! I would DIE if I lost all of our pictures! My husband laughs at me because people know that if there’s a fire, he’s getting the baby, and I’m getting the harddrive! We have easily over 18,000 pictures of our 20 month old! I keep them on our hard drive. I also send out monthly emails with my favorites from the month, so I guess if our harddrive crashed, I could go back in my gmail account…. and yes, you do NEED 25 pictures of their first spagetti encounter, 100 of their first _____ , 200 of them in the bath….
It’s fun to look back on!
Did you delete them from your camera already? I was downloading new pics of my daughter from my husband’s camera and noticed every picture of her since the hospital was still on the memory stick.
I have over 4,000 pictures of my 16 month old and that is just of her. I’m sorry you are going thru this.
I know this must be so hard! But if you do end up losing all those photos it’s NOT the end of the world. As you said, many people have lived through life with few or no pictures of much of their lives. Definitely many worse things could have happened than losing photos – as bad as it is you do have to keep perspective. If you do lose the photos, take some time to write down what you remember about the photos and memories. That would be something really special for Kate to have one day. Crossing my fingers for you.
You would be surprised what you can recover off your memory cards! I know people who were able to recover from over a year ago. Download a file recovery system, be prepared to spend at least $50 but you’ll be very very surprised at the results.
I don’t remember the name off the roomie my mind but email me if u want me to find the company that helped me 
I am a photographer and have deleted pics off a card before I uploaded by accident and I have been able to recover them
mindyupham@yahoo.com
I have thousands of photos of my daughter, and she’s 3. As a matter of fact, I took over 30 this morning while she was blowing bubbles outside. I am neurotic about it. I’ve gotten into the habit of uploading EVERYTHING to Flickr (I have a pro account for $24.95/year) before I do any pairing down on my computer/external hd. It’s brought a lot of piece of mind and I don’t think I could ever have too many pictures of my baby!
Hope everything is able to be recovered!
Thank you so much for this post!
Some people try to make me feel guilty for not taking enough pictures and I’m so glad someone else understands that I don’t need a picture of every little thing . . I’d rather be in the moment, enjoying myself, than worrying about capturing it.
I constantly struggle with how many we keep. I don’t need 20 pictures of him picking his nose but for some reason I struggle to delete the extras.
I have gotten better at it and try to pick a best of the best folder for each month and limit myself to less than 50 but it’s hard.
We did buy two external hard drives that we rotate. We leave one at his parents and one here. When we’re going up we’ll do a quick back up and take it with us. Then we grab the one that was up there and bring it home. That way we always have one off site back up just in case of disaster (it has more than just pics on it…it has all of our financial records too)
I have an 11 week old, Vivian. I have so many pictures already! I decided to print out 10 per month for an actual photo album that will be of her first year. I had the same thoughts you did…honestly, how many pictures do we really need. I just want to capture the 10 best from each month so that she has something to see when she is grown up but I don’t (or can’t afford) to make, buy, and store hundreds (or thousands) of pictures. Besides, I probably won’t be so obsessive over the next babies so why make them feel bad when I forget to even take pictures of them!
My daughter is about to turn 5 months old and I just took a peek and her monthly picture folders have between 200 and 300 pictures EACH. I have been through some of those and edited, others I haven’t. Either way, I would be devastated if I lost them.
I can sympathize, though, because we lost all of our delivery pics. My husband used his phone in the OR and when we went to look at them they were nowhere to be found, the phone ate them. Which was even more devastating considering I had the delivery from hell and those were my consolation.
Good luck and I’m praying that you are able to recover your pics!
Oh man
I hope the computer hospital is able to pull those pictures… I would be devastated if this happened to me, so I can only imagine how you feel. At least you have some pictures, though, so all is not lost!! I am going to back up all of mine tonight though. Thank you for the reminder – I keep putting it off, but tonight is the perfect time to do this.
Hey Dusty. I’m a long time reader who lives in Madison, but I’ve never commented. I work at Gillware Data Recovery over on the east side of town. I’m not sure who has your drive right now, but if they’re not successful you might want to check us out.
–Katy
Hey Dusty –
I had a similar issue when Thomas was 6 weeks old. I was luckily able to recover our hard drive, but I went right out and bought an external hard drive.
I have every picture I took last year on the hard drive, and when this first year is up I’ll make a photo book of just his first year, print some of the best ones for a traditional photo album just in case, and burn a cd of my favorites. I’m going to try to limit pictures to one CD of photos per year per kid – and then one for each big event like family trips. I figure they’re easy to store – maybe even in a safe deposit box and will make it easy for me to go back and find embarrassing baby pictures for his high school year book and wedding slide shows.
Of course, this is all theoretical. I have yet to put any of it into action.
I can’t imagine the stress of not knowing if my photos were salvageable or not.
My daughter was born 4 months ago and I easily have over 1000 photos of her. No, I certainly do not need them all but I’m glad I have them.
Sounds like you do have the ones that you really love and hopefully most of the really memorable/important moments.
Either way, life will go on but I’m hoping for the best for your computer!!!
My theory is there can’t be enough pictures of a cute baby. I hope hope hope you get your pics back!
I know this is difficult but I think as Kate gets older, she will appreciate the beautiful thoughts and funny memories you’ve documented in this blog even more than any standalone photos. And there are a lot of great pics here too! your faithfulness to this blog will stand as the greatest memory of all!
I can only imagine the anxiety you are feeling right now, because I am the same way! I have all of my daughter’s pictures copied onto an external hard drive, and can only guess as to the number of photos I have of her! I truly hope you are able to recover them!
Oh no! I hope that the computer hospital will help out. I know a few years ago we thought our hard drive had crashed and they were able to build an external hard drive out of it and it ended up only being the motherboard that went out.
We always back up all our pictures to smugmug.com and its worth the $40 a year we pay. I know there are a few websites that are free but if you ever want to get the full size image you can not do it. smugmug.com allows you to get the entire full size image just in case the hard drive does crash and it cant be repaired.
i HATE that you might lose all your pictures, i really do. i’d be freaking out in a major way, and i don’t even have kids!
however…i think you make an excellent point asking yourself how many pictures you really need. i think the fact that we have the option to have thousands of pictures makes us believe that we really need that many, when in reality i don’t think we do. when i look back at pictures from times before digital cameras were invented (high school & college especially), i treasure each picture in a way that i don’t treasure pictures now, b/c now i have 10-20 snapshots from any given moment! i don’t know…sometimes i just feel like we’d be better off to go back to the days of film cameras where we treasured the few pictures we got and were satisfied to have a relatively small amount.
again, i really do hate this computer situation for you! but if you do end up losing your pictures, hopefully you can switch your mindset like you were talking about and just be happy to have the pictures you have.
wishing you the best of luck recovering your files!
Right after I read your previous post I told my husband “w need to back up”. Losing all of the pictures/videos is a huge fear or mine. BUT, you just put things into perspective for me. Do I really need this many pictures of one person? Afterall, will I be able to take even half as many with out next kiddo? I do, however understand you pain!
I just sent you an email….I can almost guarantee that your pictures are still there! Even if you delete a picture on your phone or laptop, it’s still secretly stored deep in your phone/laptop. Unless it was a fire, large magnet or flood, your pictures are still stored in the depths of your computer and even the computer hospitals or data recovery places (after they significantly overcharge you because you’re desperate) may tell you they can’t get them off but really, they’re still there.
okay, as a mom who is creating the high school graduation “shrine”…and going crazy sorting through poorly organized pictures…less than you think.
And start a graduation photo file NOW.
I think honestly I’m going to delete this blog off my bookmarks……it used to be filled with fun, different things but I believe its turned into exactly what you said you hoped it would not. A blog about nothing but children. I love kids and have them but need other stimuli! Good luck!
the prev. poster is right, sadly. Not that there are actually too many posts anymore. Must be busier nowadays. Bummer, was once something to look forward to~~the posts.
Thank you for your feedback everyone. It’s good to know I’m not alone, and I hope this scare will help me keep perspective and hold on to only my most favorite photographs. In case you haven’t heard, all of my pictures have been successfully recovered (YAY!) and I will be considering a lot of the great advice you’ve given as I figure out which kind back-up system(s) will work best for me.
@TheHelpmeet–Thank you so much for your sweet comment; it really meant a lot to me as I was trying to come to terms with possibly never seeing these pictures again.
@my last 2 Anonymous commenters–I can certainly understand if you’ve found that this shift in my lifestyle focus (and therefore what I write about) isn’t for you. No worries!
I had a similar fear about losing all my photographs of our young son. There are many great online backup solutions that are fairly cheap.
We use Carbonite and it’s been good. $50 per year for unlimited storage and it’s fully automated. As soon as I add new photos, they are automatically backed up. Best thing is that it’s off site, so I’m covered in the worst case scenarios (theft or fire).
Another one I’ve heard great things about is Mozy.
Everyone needs to have some sort of backup solution like this in place.