Last February there were about two hours where I thought I accidentally deleted every single picture of my daughter Lucy since she was born back in May. I can’t even really explained what happened, but I was trying to back my iPhoto up to our external hard drive. This used to be a much easier task than it is now, but I clicked a few things, realized it looked like all the photos from the hard drive were being brought back onto my laptop and stopped that process. See, the whole reason I needed to back things up was because I was way low on memory. Cancelling that action made it look like every single picture taken in 2011 or possibly even earlier had been deleted. Not trashed, because I could have pulled them out, but vanished.

I felt like I was going to throw up. I freaked out, looking everywhere I could think to find the images and came up with nothing. I even emailed a friend from college I haven’t spoken to in forever to see if he could help. I felt like a tool for doing that, but I needed to find these pictures. I searched around online to find a few possible things that could help me out and then, I’m not sure why, I decided to right click on the iPhoto library icon. That’s when I saw that it has an option in the drop down menu that says “Show Package Contents.” If you select that, then you can see the files organized by year and month with all your pictures in them. This is how things used to be organized before an update or new operating system or something. Maybe they did it like that so you couldn’t accidentally delete photos, but it literally drove me insane for two hours.

Those were very honestly two of the worst hours of my life. I’ve felt so sad or mad that I’m actually sick to my stomach, but it has never lasted that long. The whole thing started while Lu was taking a nap, but she woke up and that made it even harder. I can not tell you how glad I am that I figured out what happened, but I’m still not completely comfortable. I know external hard drives can be tricky at best. I want to get an external DVD burner (my built in one doesn’t work anymore for some reason) to make physical copies and maybe get some kind of cloud back-up system to be extra sure. I used to laugh at people who would do all that, but now I’ve actually got important things I want to keep.

By the way, the next time I opened iPhoto after that? Everything was back to normal like nothing ever happened. Times like this make me wish I had been even more interested in computers and really got to understand how the work. It’s a bit unsettling trusting so much of my life to something I can’t really fix.