Twenty-five video poems lost on the fried hard drive

The 1TB LaCie was, I thought, my safest external hard drive, and I kept my back-up on it. But I make video poems, which eat disk space. So my desktop hard drive filled up, and another 500GB EXT HHD hard drive was full, so the back up became the archive. I'm currently out of work, and hadn't bought another drive for back-up when I was clearly bursting at the seams. And was flat up against not being able to continue with a few video projects because I had no disk space. Now, however, the money I was going to use to fix the LaCie will go to a cheaper Western Digital 1TB EXT HHD, and then I can continue with the videos. The LaCie disc itself is dead, it won't turn at all, but the data is probably fully intact, and there are ways to retrieve it. I was quoted $1,000. which is out of my budget range, but you never know... a deal may come up, a computer student may appear, or I could find I can afford it down the road.

If not, well, I'm a self-taught video artist, learning as I go, and while that drive has 2 years of work on it, it is early stuff. There are a couple of videos I'm sad I won't be able to include in a DVD collection, but otherwise, eh. On with the new.

The good news is all the videos are at YouTube; images in Picasa. Artwork is fine, of course - I have the originals. What's online is not the highest resolution, or the quality you'd need to make DVDs, or art prints, etc., but at least I still have a record of these lost years.

All my documents were double backed-up, so that's fine.

With an empty 1TB ext hdd, I look forward to getting back to work.


direct link: 25 video poems by Brenda Clews

Sigh, after embedding my video poetry playlist at YouTube, when I look at what I've lost -the original footage and Final Cut files for all these videos- if I can't afford to retrieve them from the defunct hard drive before the data disappears in however many years, while I try to be optimistic, yes, I do weep a little. Trying to be positive though!