Last night I discovered that I should be very angry at myself. Again.

I somehow managed to permanently lose irreplaceable digital photo files. Again.

A couple of months ago I transferred all of my photos from my laptop to my USB external hard drive. I had been keeping most of them there anyhow, but decided to move all of them over to free up space for Vista which seems to consume an increasing amount of space as the days go by. Several months before the transfer, in January, I had backed up all photos to DVD. The missing photo was taken in April.

While I was transferring the photos, I may have somehow failed to copy them before deleting from the laptop hard drive. However, I think my mistake was not realizing that my cameras, both Pentax, had begun duplicating file names. I was warned by my computer that the files already existed while being copied, but I assumed this was because I did, in fact, have some of the files on both drives.

Whether I overwrote different files that shared names or I forgot to copy files over, I don't know. Whichever, I am pissed. At me.

This is the second time I've lost a bunch of photos because of my screwing around with moving files and wiping drives and stuff I shouldn't do without verifying all is well. The first time, I knew exactly what I'd lost. This time, I only know I'm missing two photos of a lizard from the Grand Canyon. There are probably others missing, but I can't even think of what they might be, so I guess I can't miss them too much. I have some consolation from the fact that I have a printed 4x6 of the lizard photo, and a small version of it posted here on the blog.

Ugh.