As I watched my oldest daughter dressed as Mary Poppins on her third birthday jump into a chalk picture I realized I would have paid any sum of money for that video.
You see, three days earlier we had an accident. Every video file I had of both my daughters was on an external hard drive that fell to the floor. I was in the middle of organizing them to then archive them before the hard drive stopped working.
I was thrown into a panic. I was sick to my stomach and knew not to try the broken hard drive too many times as it would reduce my ability to recover the files.
I started to go through every possible back up I might have. Over the next few days I began to recover most of the videos, but about a year could not be found. That year included videos of my daughters third and first birthdays.
My wife and I debated what to do. We were relieved the videos of our girls as babies were recovered. We also have all the photos we ever took as they were not lost. I had brought the hard drive to a local place to try and have it recovered. The cost would be $350 to buy the parts to try and repair the hard drive. If there was data recovered it would be another $750.
With no guarantee the files we were missing would be recovered, we debated whether the expense was worth it. It seemed like an expense that was not justifiable. We were both relieved to have recovered most videos, but wondered exactly what memories we were missing.
Well, as I watched my girl acting as Mary Poppins, something the photos and my memories just couldn’t capture, I realized this was really truly priceless. Knowing the videos that were missing now, I would have paid anything in retrospect.
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