Unpacking to Pack

I wrote this post earlier, but I thought I should finally publish it. Sorry for the delay.

We moved. It's new and different in the city. It's new and different living within the confines of American soil in Moscow. I will give you some comparisons to give you an idea of the changes.

Old house: 3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, fireplace, classroom in the dining room, make-shift storage shelving in every nook and cranny, 2 stall garage, main floor, single entrance, long commute. Number 3 wrote this note in chalk on our front step.

New house: 5 bedrooms, 4.5 baths, classroom upstairs, closet space we still haven't managed to fill, no garage, upper floor (16 steps per level: 32 total to go to my room), quad-style entrance, no commute

The view from our old house was trees, a lake, and a wide yard. Our view here is the Russian White house and Hotel Ukraine. For two whole years, we didn't have neighbors in the unit next to us. Now we share a quad with three other families. We can hear the kids next door running down the stairs and their mothers shouting at them to close the door.

Number 2 already made friends with nearly every kid on compound. I have barely seen his face inside our door since we arrived. Number 1 is blissfully enjoying the freedom and privacy of her own room for the very first time. She stays up too late each night reading. I can't complain.

Since we unpacked our house, I have been back to the US twice and we will all be there again in March. But it's okay. We've got a place to come back to with no boxes.

Back-up, back-up, back-up!

Number 1 had a birthday this week. Like every good parent, we took pictures of the face before the cake, blowing out the candles, and the smiles when she took a bite of her favorite homemade French Silk Pie. She is eleven. She borrows my shoes, earrings, and asks me why all the boys in this area like her so much. I wonder to myself, "when did this happen?" (stay with me...this post is actually about data recovery.)

Back-up.

Eleven years ago I was a twenty year-old with a newborn. We still took pictures with film cameras and got them developed at the local pharmacy. If you lost the photos, no biggie. Just take the negatives back to the store and have them re-developed. Data is a little more tricky.

Recently my husband and I had a miscommunication. Shocking, I know, but it sometimes happens. We have been the owners of a very nice digital camera for a few years now. I thought he said he did back up the photos but he actually said he intended to. It wasn't until the drive crashed that we realized there was not a second copy. To my friends, especially you, I know you are shaking your head at me. It wasn't me. For heaven's sakes, I am homeschooling, cooking, and successfully keeping six people alive and going. Photos are not my department.

I was kind of sad when I realized that our trips to Hawaii, Paris, New York, Washington DC, and our lives in Moscow were on that drive as well as important mile markers in our kids' lives.

We brought the external hard-drive to many of our intelligent, high-tech friends who make nerdy jokes that I didn't really understand. Anyway, one of the local geeks we know recommended a company he read about in Wired magazine. Who even reads that?

So we called up Drive Savers and they gave us the protocol involved for sending our drive. We didn't have to pay any fees or commit to anything. They would wait to see if they could fix it before charging us a dime. Who does that? They called every couple of weeks to update us on the recovery process.

Good news! Today we received our drive via FedEx. It contained 12,943 photos beginning in 2006. As I copied them onto our PC, I literally watched six years of my life flash before my eyes. I had forgotten about my trip to Florida with my best friend in 2008, Hubby's trip to New York to see Old Yankees Stadium, how beautiful Sacre Coeur gleamed in the sunset, and how much my kids have actually grown. Thank you Drive Savers. Thank you Wired.

So friends, this is a commercial. Back-up your stuff. Make CDs. Load them to an online archive, because believe me, it would have been a lot easier than paying $891. And trust me, those little people in your house won't be small forever.