I moved the major part of my photos to a hard disk not long ago and a relative kindly installed 'Photo Manager' on my Apple enabling me to move from the new and small photolibrary to the old and big and vice versa. I did this because I kept probably too many photos on my computer ( over 12 000).

But disaster, or is it one? struck yesterday after I had chosen a number of pics to export and then to upload on ipernity. And I was feeling pleased having gone through a lot of material in order to choose or having certain pictures in mind.

I have a large spiral copy-book next to the computer where I jot things down. The spirals pushed the connection out linking the hard disk to the computer. A notice came up informing me. It must have lasted an instant, but it was an unplugging of a device.

Then images began to disappear. The album I'd made for export was still there, but it wouldn't be exported. And then soon all caches were blank caches.

After closing these processes down I started them up again and a notice came up to say "rebuilding caches" and this gave me hope. But after several hours there were no images to be seen.

Now I do have a number of CD-roms containing a lot of my photos. I thought I'll have to look for them and find out what's what.

But today there is some news : I'm told that I can have a phone talk tomorrow evening to start doing something and that the situation is not as bad as all that. So maybe those images are somewhere on the hard disk and can be made to manifest themselves — like butterflies.

I draw some conclusions: thank goodness for also saving on CD-roms and I should be more systematic. Then, the connection is clearly a hazard. One might pull it out without closing the device ( stupid perhaps, but human). And more interesting: having one's photos on ipernity! Keeping them in cyberspace. And all kinds of other docs. However, I suppose one should not keep all one's eggs in one basket. But it's an exciting prospect for someone of my age who has lived in a quite different technological world to think of storing docs of different media in this manner, to me it's rather mind-boggling, as they say.

I thought I'd share this experience and these thoughts — with some of my friends probably who may visit ipernity and with members some of whom may be concerned with the matter of storing and retrieving.