I hope that everyone enjoyed their President’s Day. I wanted to touch base on Facebook today as I had an interesting exchange there recently.
My external hard drive died and while I had the original files on my server, I stupidly saved my only copy of about 10 years worth of photos on the drive to save space. So, when the drive died so did my photos. I lamented about my problem through my Facebook status line. And in came the Calvary.
I had recently befriended two folks that came to my aid. One person whom I knew in high school, but we really didn’t “hang out”. And a woman that I knew in my twenties that I hung out with occasionally, but wasn’t really in my circle of close friends.
Almost immediately they both (along with another current colleague) came to my aid. They both work in IT and had a variety of ideas about what had happened to the drive and how to resolve the situation. My colleague also had a “trick” that ultimately didn’t work, but was worth trying.
I was surprised that after at least fifteen years, these kind folks were willing to share their knowledge to help me in my time of need…without any prompting.
I often hear that Facebook is just a time suck (it is most of the time) and that you shouldn’t be “friends” with everyone. But, I truly believe that you never know when you’re going to need that “friend” that you didn’t know you had.
Many thanks to Jimmy, Reb and Leslie for coming to my aid. It has been confirmed that the drive is indeed mostly dead and I’m considering sending it off to a data recovery center just to see if anything can be salvaged. We also received the advice to potentially replace the circuit board and we might try that out. I’ve come to terms that my photos are probably gone and a very valuable lesson was learned.
People – learn from me. 1) Don’t be so stingy with your FB friendship and 2) BACKUP ALL OF YOUR DATA!! 
