MAJOR trauma for the Gamble fam...

So, yesterday morning as I was getting ready for class, I stopped at the computer to check my e-mail. Since the internet wasn't working, I decided to shut down and restart the computer, which typically works just fine. Well, I guess the restart process was going a little too slow (so slow that I thought the screen had frozen up) and I proceeded to press the F10 System Recovery option... which eventually resulted in basically removing everything precious and valuable on our computer... all of our pictures (including honeymoon pictures!), itunes (josh's greatest concern), important documents (including our wedding guest list that I'd worked on for at least 9 months), resumes, and more... Needless to say, it was very traumatic, and I fell apart. Poor Joshy G. You know he was pissed at my mistake but also knew the tremendous remorse and heartache I was experiencing over possibly losing our pictures of precious memories. I left our friend Dave C., who we consider our token computer genius, a desperate message on his cell phone. He texted back (he was at work) and said he wasn't personally capable of recovering all of our stuff, but suggested a local guy who could. I called the guy, took him our computer tower (for our hard drive), and prayed. The guy said that unless I'd somehow completely over-written our hard drive, that he should be able to salvage most of our stuff. He told me that it'd be about 24 hrs and that if I heard from him before then, it meant it was a lost cause. Since I took him our tower yesterday around 11am, I'm taking it as a good sign that I haven't heard from him yet.

*UPDATE* I just heard from the guy and he said that things were looking good...finding a lot of stuff, but that our hard drive had some bad spots on it (also meaning even though I did screw up, our hard drive was going bad anyways, so it's good we caught it now), so he recommended getting a new internal hard drive and said regardless of whether we did that or not, we needed an external drive to back up everything so this would not happen again. I've gotta talk to Josh and get back to him about that, but I definitely went straight from the computer guy to the store to buy an external hard drive yesterday. Sometimes you have to learn lessons the hard way. Trust me, I've learned mine and would like to encourage all of you to go right now and back up anything you don't want to lose!

Side note: For those concerned, I did remember that I'd uploaded our honeymoon pics to snapfish and some of our other pics to fbook, so that made me feel a little better.... and I have 1 single hard copy of the wedding addresses... and apparently since you buy the license to the songs on itunes, they can give them to you again if you lose them. So... while yesterday felt like a big storm of poop, it could've been worse, I suppose. Still very traumatic!