A few years ago one of my hard drives crashed. I had sat down at my desk and immediately saw the light blinking.

My heart just sank. I felt physically ill.

I tried multiple times to recover it. My friends tried. It was just unreadable. Over forty thousand images, poof-gone. It still makes me sick to think about it. 

It's possible that I could send it off to a static free lab to pull the inner disc and try to recover it. But that costs more money than I make in a month and there are no guarantees. It will be some time before I can try that. 

But once in awhile the universe throws me a bone. I find on old disc, or maybe a smaller hard drive I may have had a few backups on, or even an online storage file I'd forgotten about.

And when that happens, I breath a small sigh of relief. I stop and celebrate a thankful moment to have restored a small portion of my past that I thought gone forever except in my memories. 

Garrett was two. I had a substandard camera and minimal editing software back then. I am thankful for every shot, good or bad, that I recovered.