Sorry for the abrupt end to the daily chicken photos. The other day, while I was uploading the daily shots of the little ladies my computer abruptly crashed. I had day 12 photos of:
Pepper
Cry-Baby
and Ramona
I really love this shot of Ramona’s wing.
I really HATE having a project interrupted. The daily momentum keeps me going, which is why a lot of our projects are daily ones ($5/person/day and 31 recipes in 31 days). And sure, I could have kept on photographing until I had my computer situation worked out, but I was pretty upset and could only focus on trying to save the year’s worth of photos I had never backed up (which included half of our spring break trip photos and all the videos I hadn’t uploaded anywhere at all).
Long story short, my hard drive and photos and a lot of of other documents are gone. Trying to focus on the positive:
– I replaced the hard drive myself and fixed my laptop for only $80
– I’m trying out Ubuntu and freeing myself of Windows for awhile
– Jess and I both got new Android phones (matching G2X’s) and are crazy about them
– I think the chicks’ development has slowed enough that it is time to do photos 2-3 times a week anyway
And most importantly, little Hatchet-Face is still alive. You needed a Hatchy update, right?
Yesterday while we visited our next door neighbors and their new, full grown hens, I had pretty much given up on Hatchet-Face. She has been a lot more lively looking, but just didn’t seem to be feeding herself much. We can’t force feed her forever, so I was starting to think we were just prolonging the inevitable.
And then we went home and I went to force feed her some cooked egg yolk. And then something amazing happened. She started to scarf it down on her own. She has shown so little interest in food lately, that was incredible. And then she was in the brooder, fighting with her sisters over a worm, chasing them and running away from them with gusto. She has gained some weight, but not as much as the rest of them. I’m hoping at this point that she is a bantam (miniature), and she had some kind of bug but will recover.
Pepper and little Hatchet-Face.
Stay tuned for their TWO WEEK OLD photos and their first field trip to the great outdoors!
krista and jess 
hooray for hatchet-face! p.s. sooooo sorry about your hard drive!
oh man. the data is definitely gone? are the pics on flickr?
yay yay little hatchet!
Some photos are uploaded on flickr, but that’s all we have. There are a whole, whole lot that are not uploaded. Like, at least half of our vacation. And a ton of other stuff. So, that’s a bummer, but a good excuse to take another vacation and learn to back up our files more often.
The data is on a corrupted hard drive. Maybe or maybe not it could be recovered, but it would be extremely expensive (huge, huge photo files, mostly) and Krista doesn’t delete bad photos as she goes through them — so we would pay a fortune to get back a lot of pictures we don’t care about, and a few pictures we do.
i will admit that i am the same way in that i do not delete, and admit that i recently spent a large chunk of change on saving a corrupted hard drive. this difference between us probably speaks to the fact that you are debt free and i am debt full! that being said i think when the photos in question are of babies and toddlers it is harder to resist doing all to salvage them.
then again anything that is an excuse for more vacationing is a good thing!!! and i hope we’ve both at least kinda sorta learned our lesson.
We’re not exactly debt-free, but we do try to spend money wisely. The pro’s and con’s just didn’t pan out for the data recovery. I wish we could do it, though. I didn’t take a lot of photos on vacation, and now I am going to forget all that cool stuff.
How often do you back-up your data now? Do you do a back up of your whole system? or do you just depend on the photos on flickr? I would like to find some sort of “cloud” solution to all of our data, because every time we switch computers, we lose a lot. I would like for all of our computers to wirelessly back-up to some safe place in the sky on a regularly-scheduled basis. And I would like to spend less than $25 a year on it. I don’t think that’s possible. But I dream.
ok let’s see…. i had the saved data put onto an external hard drive. then i copied it from the external hard drive into my new computer – BUT it is kept separate from the “new computer” world. in other words, when i am operating on a day to day normal basis, it’s as if i have a new computer without the old stuff on it. but whenever i want to i can sign on under “old computer” and then my new computer is as if it’s the old one. i can actually have both “computers” running simultaneously and switch between the two but this makes things operate more slowly.
so to recap what i’ve said so far, my old photos (which were on the corrupted drive) are in the external hard drive and on the hard drive of my new computer (but not in my way with their less-organized-ness).
i have since backed up all the data on my new computer onto the external hard drive. but i will admit that i haven’t done it in a while. it’s extremely easy to do. if i wanted i could leave it connected all the time and it would back up every hour, but i don’t want both hard drives to be right near each other, i want the external one to have a somewhat less precarious existence than my computer does (since we use the same table for computing, eating, and unfortunately climbing!)
on top of all that, there is the online backing up. i try to keep up with putting all new photos onto flickr. in theory, in addition to this, i am backing them up onto mobile-me (soon to become iCloud?)… but i’m already behind on doing that even though it’s the easiest thing in the world.
now the OLD data – i had started a project of getting them all organized and onto flickr, because my online photo existence has been too all-over-the-place. but i neglect this project horribly, because it’s a lot and it’s confusing and i can barely keep up w the present much less the past. however, now that i saved those photos from the corruption, at least i have them on two hard drives even though only some of them are on flickr.
i think that even if you don’t do anything else, you should get an external hard drive and back up all your photos onto it periodically. then when you get a new computer you can put all your old photos into it and you will still have all your photos on two hard drives.
i thought that doing that was wrong/crazy, and that i should be aiming for cloud-only storage. but my “mac helper” told me that it is reasonable to keep things on your hard drive, since hard drives get bigger and bigger and should be able to keep up with normal family photos. my old computer was so overly full, even after i did lots of wacko stuff like deleting it’s ability to use anything but english, and there were so many things wrong with it that there were a whole bunch of normal-functioning things i couldn’t do. (it also was all outdated and didn’t recognize the existence of iphones.) that’s why i thought i was “wrong” to be keeping things on hard drive but dan the mac man was of a different opinion so i will just listen to my guru :)
i think now i owe you a cookie.
Yeah, I have a few external hard drives that I back up to (albeit not frequently enough) but I need something that is easier and automated. I have a laptop, which is always moving around the house and spends most of its time on my bedside, so it would be a real hassle to also keep an external harddrive on my bedside for automated back up purposes.
Even tho mac has the built in “time machine” i still don’t do it. Because I am a bad person, I guess. But if the time machine talked to the cloud and did it automatically without my intervention or extra power cords, then I would be so happy.
PEPPER SEEMS TALL
god that sucks. :(
can you tell us if ubuntu is good/bad/whocares and what that means if you want to switch to it?
So far I like it. I have had a dual boot machine w/ Linux before years ago. This is a nice system for a user that is not a super computer nerd. I can figure my way around computers a little but not a ton, and so far I’ve been able to install stuff pretty easily. I’m no expert, though!