Technology Frustrations

So I have been really frustrated with our computer lately. It's totally unorganized and cluttered with who knows what information. Mostly it's applications we don't need or old ones that never got erased. We bought the newer version of iLife about a 6 months ago as well and uploaded that onto our computer hoping for better iWeb tools. I was disappointed. I just thought there would be more! In the process though we also got the new iPhoto. Now that had some cool functions but I realized that when I tried to work through finder to find my photo's to upload, they weren't there! I would have to export every photo out of iPhoto into a file there so I could upload them into my blog. Before we got the new app, we had about a million copies of every photo we had put on our computer. Somehow they got saved into multiple folder or duplicated many times over and they were consuming our Hard Drive. It took us FOREVER to pare them down to what we wanted. I didn't want that to happen again if I was saving the pics in multiple places on my computer. I felt like I should be able to access my iPhoto data in the photo cache or data file or library icon in my finder but those files would never open or would just open iPhoto.

I figured that someone on the computer these files must be hiding and thought that maybe if I moved all iphoto stuff into one folder it would be easier to sort through and see if there were duplicates. I mean I had the iPhoto data icons in 3 different places on my computer with different dates and amounts of info stored! That just didn't seem right. So I moved one of the iPhoto icons into the folder and a warning box came up asking if I was sure I wanted to replace the older file with this newer file I was moving in. I assumed (stupid me) newer mean it was the version that we had uploaded 6 months ago and must be the one I wanted. So I said yes.

And I don't have time machine.

They are gone. My entire iPhoto library has been wiped. :'-( I spent 4 hrs trying to recover photos on sunday. I found some hidden in the hard drive. I had to search for the photo names. But I haven't found them all, just portions of each of the many albums I had. Thankfully I had exported some already (I guess YAY for those duplicates!!) but it's so sad. And I have many on my website and picassa, so double Yay. Lessons like this just make me want to go and buy a huge stack of cd's and burn a copy EVERY time I upload anything on the computer. You never know when you'll be an idiot. If anyone has and mad crazy recover skills or 3rd party software that finds stuff like that and you want to help, let me know! But according the the apple website, sucks for me, they're gone. Of course I only read afterward that you are NEVER supposed to do that.