5 Months lost and a lesson in Idolatory.

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall

So... a funny thing happened on 6 Jan 2013.
My dearest daughter accidentally tripped over the computer power cord at home, which was still attached to my office notebook (which I use it for everything)... still on. So it kinda fell to the floor, and started making these strange R2D2 noises.

Well, after about 1 hour, I got irritated with the noise - so took a look. Starting it up, it just nicely informed me that the hard disk is missing. Erm, that doesn't sound so good. So I reboot it, and this time, it asked me to install an Operating System. Not quite sure which is worse.

All the Kings Men Couldn't Put Humpty
So next day (was a Monday), I asked my IT guy to take a look, and he says "I hope you have a backup, coz it doesn't look like I can recover anything from your harddisk - it's dead".
Ok, I wasn't all that worried, coz I've been diligently backing up my hard-drive on 2 separate external hard disk - using a new 1 TB Western Digital Harddisk with its proprietary backup software and free Crashplan software to backup to an older 300GB hard disk. Plus I do have my documents mirrored on SugarSync (cloud storage).

Took a week to get a new harddisk installed, and I got my computer back on Friday, time to try for the first time, to retrieve a back up.

Backup #1: WD hard drive - gave me data only up to April 2012. Huh?

Backup#2: Despite Crashplan telling me when I don't backup (every sat and sun), the backup was only as at early Aug 2012. Oh oh..... A check, showed that crashplan had multiple backup copies, and it reached the max disk space in Aug - but it didn't inform me that, and I didn't check. It kinda just backed up into.... thin air.

Together Again?
So I reinstate from Backup #2, yes, with 5 months of missing info - including my pictures (those who know me, will know that that is a bit of a passion of mine); emails.
Then I went about painfully redownloading every program, and reinstalling it - Lightroom; itunes, Dropbox, SugarSync, etc - then it occurred to me that SugarSync has my documents - hooray! So I managed to get back all my word/excel/powerpoint docs right up to when my computer crashed.

Then it was to set up my outlook/itunes/blackberry.
The email setup was particularly painful. When I synced with gmail, emails kept coming in... in the hundreds each time. Checking further, I realized that I could pull down new mails only, or when I enabled POP. Since I wanted the last 5 months of emails, I had to down all.. and it just didn't seem to stop... 3thousand... 4 thousand.... then I realize that I couldn't sync the blackberry and ipad. More pain. 5 days later, just today, I finally received in outlook Jan2013 emails! I must have deleted 20,000 emails or more.

The stinger is... my lost pictures. Suddenly I remember what I lost, shooting my son's indoor basketball game; family 1st trip back to Makassar; my wedding shoot for Elliot in Singapore. Hmm. Thankfully, I'm a fairly active Facebook poster (see... there's a use for using facebook after all!) - so the more significant pictures is there, albeit in low res, FB degraded quality, but better than nothing I guess. Raw/original files are gone.

Strangely, I was more annoyed with my email, than the lost pictures. I'm not as affected as I'd imagine I'd be. This accident has of course happened in the course of the Sovereign will of God. There's nothing I can do about it (ok, I did ask the IT guy to see if there's a vendor out there, who can try and rescue the info in the damaged harddrive).

A few things I realize
1.Our lives revolve around so much of the computer, that when it's gone, I feel completely paralyzed. I couldn't do anything.

2.Back up - and test! Ain't worth much, if it doesn't work. But this time, I'm going to look at disk imaging instead, and may even spend money!

3.Lost of pictures, is perhaps a test by God. Has photography become an idol of mine? Lets' see what happens when its taken away. The harder you grip on to something so tightly, the more painful it is, when God pries open our fingers.

Yes, I lost 5 months of photographs, all from my nice new D600. But yes, it is a wake up call by God on idolatry - has it become too important to me? And thank you God, that in the light of eternity, those 5 months pale in comparison.

Matthew 6:19-21
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.