Hard Lesson Learned

Last year I purchased a 2 year old laptop from a friend who got an incredible deal through his school. The price was way to good to pass up so I dropped the cash and scored a nice Toshiba laptop with everything I could ever need on it. I mainly use the computer for photo storage, video editing and writing documents. The laptop has wireless internet capabilities, but I have only used them a dozen or so times as the computer mainly stays at home and the house computer has internet access so I just use that. It is great to have a laptop for traveling to pass the time and store pictures. I had several thousand pics taken in the last year including all of my traveling adventures. By complete coincidence many of the best pictures and all of the best video has been transferred to other computers over time, but I never thought of actually backing everything up to disk until about a month ago. When I did decide to back everything up the copying to the burn folder was taking way to long as I was going to transfer everything via disc of just store it on discs. I decided that this might be a good time to defragment my harddrive to make the process go smoother. I started the defragmentation, came back a couple of hours later to check on the progress and the computer was completely frozen. That is time I accessed any of my files. Just the other day I left it in the hands of a very capable expert who after using all of his knowledge, various programs, other operating systems, networks, everything, has declared the harddrive bunk. It is done. My files are gone. Everything. Forever. In the blink of an eye a years worth of memories completely wiped. I am not happy with myself....