10/8/21 UPDATE ON THE HARD DRIVE. IT’S A MECHANICAL PROBLEM. I received a call from the bloke at Fields Recovery and he gave me some bad news. The engineers made a note that there are some failed mechanical parts and they would have to rebuild it to see if they are able to retrieve the photos. Steve mentioned that this could be from $500 to $1200 and I told him that I will probably not move forward with the recovery. These are personal photos and I’m not a professional, and the cost is not worth it. Fortunately, I had some photos on my SD cards that I was able to put onto the new drive, so they are safe and sound. All I have to do is find the rest of my SD cards, and maybe I’ll be able to retrieve most of the photos from Yellowstone. Boohoo!

10/5/21 Hillsboro, ND
A couple of days ago, I was writing for the blog and was trying to upload some pictures from my external hard drive but couldn’t access it. I did a little diagnostic testing on my laptop and the drive had changed names and letter. So I tried to use the Disk Management tool to see if I could change the letter back to the original one. There was a notice that the computer was trying to connect to the Virtual Disc service (Windows 10) but nothing was happening. I tried to open it in Lightroom to no avail. I am not that technical but I figured something was wrong. I was able to open my new SSD drive, but not the other one. I happened to be in Fargo for an art walk and drove to the Best Buy, and all I had to say was Disk Management and the tech said “Your drive is corrupted. We will have to send it to Texas and it will cost between $500 and $1000 to retrieve the files.” I made an appointment and went home and decided to shop around for a better price. I found another place with a plant in Missouri and will send it there. They offer a free diagnostic and shipping and no obligation. We’ll see what happens.

I was really good at backing up my photos to my 3T back up drive at home, but since I’ve been on the road this year, I was aware that my 1T external hard drive was full, and starting copying and moving photos and files to Dropbox. I even bought a new 1T SSD drive so I could use that for files in 2020 and on. However, I never got around to copying my 2021 files and now they are stuck in the hard drive that got corrupted. Now I have to send the drive to a recovery service to see if they can retrieve my 2021 files. Lesson learned: don’t wait to back up your photos! This could cost a few hundred bucks and now I have to let go of some of my budget to replace my stolen camera. Bummer! You may wonder what happened to the hard drive. Well, it’s been 16 months that I’ve been on the road and my drive was in my computer back pack thinking it was well protected. Most likely, it was just abused between full and being on the road. I am kicking myself as we speak because I was prepared for this but just blew the transfer off. Now it’s too late. Hopefully, the recovery service will be able to save my photos. The good news is that some of 2021 was backed up when I got home in April, but not since then. All of my Yellowstone photos are not backed up. 😦
Moving forward, I think I’ll keep my photos on my SD cards and just buy a few more until I can back them up. I’ll see what I can do with the ones I still have. (expletive, expletive!) I am kinda sad.