So a few days ago my wife and I learned an expensive lesson about how the fragility of external hard drives and the curiosity of a 14 month year old just *do* _NOT_ mix.

When my son was born, I decided that I was going to keep all of my photos off on an external hard drive. That way, I reasoned, I could take it with me if I ever needed to show all bajilion photos and movies to interested friends and family (that circumstance, I should add, has never actually occurred).

I guess this wouldn’t be a problem in and of itself, except that I have never gotten around to backing up said photos and movies of my son — Memories, as it were, since the moment he was born — either on DVD or otherwise.

Part of that was the lethargy in backing up almost 50-100 gigs of media and the fact that I had a broken DVD burner.

I had a great idea the other day that I should back it up online via JungleDisk as the prices to use Amazon’s A3 service is quite economical. Unfortunately, I was at about Day 9 out of 17 in my 24/7 back up, when the unstoppable force (my son) met the very fragile and very movable object that was my external hard drive.

Needless to say, my wife and I had a sickening feeling as we realized that we couldn’t access the drive any further.

What was the price to pay for our folly?

What was the price we paid for the memories of our son?

As for the latter question, at the time we thought “Anything!” And, of course, that’s sort of true even now. But what we did do is bring it to a data-recovery specialist near by (who has international offices), called WeRecoverData.com, who discovered that the fall caused “unit instability” and “logical errors”, requiring them to “manually rebuild file-system components”.

Final cost to attempt to recover all of this data?

$1300.

Well, after the sticker shock (and realization that this Christmas is going to be a little lot less generous) we have learned an expensive lesson in data management.

And you can bet that when we get it all back its going to get backed up in triplicate (or duplicate), with copies online, offline, and possibly hard copies as well.

<sigh>