You know there are times in your life where something happens and you really can’t control how or why it happens, but it leaves you feeling frustrated and powerless?  Okay, I had an experience like that.  I am a collector by nature.  I keep lots of pictures on my hard drive.  I know I shouldn’t but it just happens like that.  Ultimately, I think they all need backed up somewhere online, but I haven’t figured out where yet.  Well, after my son was born in January, I had tons of pictures laying around in various places on my computer.  I had bought a one terabyte hard drive and decided to start using it as a backup.  I backed up everything.  You know the way you are supposed to.  Then I deleted everything off my computer after verifying everything was backed up.

A Month goes by, quickly, I might add.  A first time dad.  I was working at Olan Mills at the time.  I kept the external drive plugged in, thought, why not just use it as my “my documents” folder.  Everything is backed up to it.  It will keep my computer cleaner and save the extra step of backing up every time.

One night, returning home much intoxicated from one of my haunts about the town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence…. oh wait, that’s Edger Allen Poe’s story, not mine.

One night, returning home, we had just opened the door, when I heard something fall.  It sounded heavy.  One of our cats was sitting in the middle of the floor, poised, ready to strike, and beside him was my external hard drive.  Being the curious animal he was, he had jumped up on my desk and knocked the hard drive to the floor.  Since my computer and the hard drive were on, the hard drive began making clicking noises. I plugged it in.  Nothing but clicks.  Everything gone.  I gave it up as a total loss.  I got frustrated, loaded up a linux distro I had laying around and got the hard drive working, at least until I posted about it.

While backing everything up from the drive, it failed again. I was too frustrated to post again that the thing had failed… miserable and angry at the whole ordeal, I again gave it all up for loss.  I had small images that I had posted when he was born.  Those would have to do.  Family started asking questions about getting larger images. I told them what had happened.  Now it wasn’t just me, other people were ready to kill one of our cats.

I remembered something this morning when Animoto, sent out their newsletter.  I had made a video with them and used higher quality images to make it than I have on my blog.

I emailed them this morning if I could get a download of those images.

They emailed back wanting the exact url for the video I had put together.

I emailed it to them.

They emailed back with an individual url for every picture I had uploaded to the video.

I have since downloaded them all and backed them all up online.

Thank You Animoto.  I also really loved the slideshow I put together using your service.