i am an idiot. six years of pictures gone like that when my hard drive crashes. the blog has many of my favorite photos, so not a total loss. luckily, spenser has the most updated batch of music, so that’s not a total loss. i’ll be sending you a hard drive in the mail.
heh. i even called about data recovery services. one place said it would take anywhere from 6-16 hours @ $149/hr. so if any one knows somebody inexpensive 
edit: we’ll see how it goes. i ordered the same exact drive hoping that swapping controllers will give me access to my data!
I suggest that you buy two drives and start making periodic backups.
I’m so scared of this and have so much important data now, that I had to get the redundancy of the NAS in place to sleep soundly.
i realize i’m a fool. luckily a few people have my entire music collection, so that is safe. i thought i had at least a portion of my pictures on another hard drive, alas that’s not true. and yes, i will be be backing up to an alternative drive in the future. i have the capacity just not the effort up to this point.
it seems that we have incurred the same dilemma with the loss of files. i will back up my drive as well, and i look forward to receiving the drive, beef, to reciprocate and bring you back online.
actually, you are off the hook, spenser. i backed my stuff up with pease the beginning of may. all my new stuff had been downloaded off emusic and is stored in another drive.
Surely you have a CD burner Beef. I make 2 backups of all my photos on CD (double-redundancy). Sure they take up space, but is a lot less space than a stack of old photo albums. My sympathies for your data loss though.
cds are a great backup but for peanuts you could add further redundancy by uploading to a site like flickr or snapfish, etc. but then, i smoke cock.
a lot of them are uploaded to my website and other similar sites. however, i had 10 gb of photos. too many? possibly. i just need to back them up on dvds and my spare hard drive.