So, about those photos

Having been unsuccessful at figuring out which wire to wiggle to get my second hard drive working again, I gave in and paid a professional to look at it.  And it turns out that the reason my wire-wiggling wasn’t working this time was because the hard drive had entirely failed.  So, unless I want to pay vast amounts of money (like, nearly $1000) to a specialist data-recovery place to try and get the data off it, all my photos are gone 🙁
The good news is that I never got round to deleting the files from two of the three memory cards from last year’s trip to Greece and Italy, so I’ve still got those.  The third memory card I did delete (because I needed space on the card for graduation photos…), but the deleted photos should still be reasonably easily (and cheaply!) recoverable, so computer repair guy is going to try and get them for me.
The bad news is that all of those photos I never got round to uploading from America, and Ireland, and Australia are gone.  And even the ones I did upload to Flickr are only low-quality versions – I kept the original high-quality versions on the hard drive in case I wanted to print them one day.
There may well have been other things on the drive that I’ll regret having lost, but I can’t think of anything major – the software is easily replaceable, and anything really important I kept on the main drive (or, in the case of my thesis, on my computer at work, which is backed up to the university’s servers).  It was just the photos that I stored on the secondary drive, because they took up too much space on the main drive.
Oh well, a lesson in backing up my data, I suppose (and in not putting off sorting and uploading photos for years!).  And even though I’ve lost the photos from my travels, I’ve still got the memories.  Which is what’s really important.  So I won’t be paying vast amounts of money to get the data recovered – I’d rather spend it on another trip 🙂