The Colossal Technology Meltdown of 2011

I simply could not put my frustration regarding various forms of technology in our household into words the past month. I am calling the entire month of February "the month of the colossal technology meltdown of 2011" in the Heidemann household because frankly, it truly has been. It all started off with our laptop acting wacky coupled with the fact that I could no longer access any data off of the external hard drive. This also happened simultaneously with the SD card reader in the laptop no longer working. I was told it was probably a computer virus and I "should" be able to retrieve my data off of the hard drive. To make a very, VERY long story short, the man that told me that was wrong. I bought a second hard drive and THEN that one failed too not even a week later. THEN, after numerous rounds of troubleshooting, Dell determined that they were going to replace the laptop with another refurbished one. So to net it out....... this past month, 1 laptop and 2 external hard drives have crashed leaving us with a colossal data loss!! I am heart broken about this because much of this data is the precious photos of my 2 little guys, primarily of Jack's first year of life. So, now we are forced to spend an ridiculous amount of money to hopefully recover this data. The saga of this meltdown continues and I am still working through all of this, but it has truly been a nightmare. Ugh, this year can only get better from a technology standpoint.....
As always, when things like this happen, you have to look on the bright side, or it can eat you apart. The bright side of this is that I have learned a HUGE lesson in backing up data. My photography instructor told me last week during class that he does not consider even consider it "data" until it is backed up in at least 3 locations. Truer words have never been spoken......

Although i feel like I have lost a whole lot, I am very thankful that I still have 2 happy and healthy little boys....so, at the end of the day, life is not too shabby. Since we lost A LOT of their pics and have A LOT of money we have to save to hopefully get them back, we have a lot of picture taking to do:) I took these photos when Jack just woke up from his nap and when Mikey was thinking about waking up.....I thought they were cute.....