the kind of mistake you only make once

so - last week the hard disk on my laptop failed. I've taken it into the shop and they've told me that it needs replacing - and it's not going to be cheap. In fact it might not make financial sense to do it as the machine is getting a little old now - so it might be time to get a new machine - but they don't come cheap as we know (and if anyone feels moved to make a contribution to the 'replace matt's mac' appeal we would be glad to hear from you!).

The absolute killer though is that on my hard drive were 3 year's worth of photos which weren't backed up AND EVEN WORSE all our photos and movies of Lily-Anna from the last 9 months. Total nightmare.

The guys in the Apple shop said they'd tried 3 or 4 different ways to extract the data, all of which have failed. So our last hope is to send the hard drive off to a specialist data recovery place in London.

I have an external USB hard drive but haven't used it to back up our photos - it's the kind of mistake you only make once in your life.