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My buddy was able to recover the vast majority of the family pictures we had lost (It's a long story, the gist of which is in the vent thread). There's a gap of maybe 3 months, but luckily it's a period in which there weren't really any major events or occasions. Whew. Edit to add: Holy crap!!! It looks like I'm going to be able to recover pretty much everything! Maybe not every last picture, but at least not any gaping holes. We had two copies of everything (three if you count the DVD backups that we can't find anywhere - I'm convinced my wife brought them with her somewhere but she was so pissed at me over the whole situation that I dare not "accuse" her of misplacing them. Maybe some other year...) - one on an old laptop hard drive that I had put in an external USB enclosure and one on her work computer, where she would take the files of the camera. She erased the work computer's hard drive when it was replaced with another machine, and I erased the external hard drive and sold it on eBay in a lot of spare/semi-functional laptop parts, thinking that another drive that I did keep had all the pictures on it. Well, besides our friend being able to recover a ton of stuff from her computer, I was luckily able to get the drives I sold back from the ebay buyer (refunded his money and let him keep everything else, so he was perfectly happy). I've been running Recuva on the one drive over the course of today, and it got back a whole bunch more stuff! So many things had to go wrong for this to happen in the first place, and so many things had to go right in order to recover. I'm still processing it all.

Fitted a young kid today in his first hockey helmet, he was probably no more than 3 years old. The minute I snapped the last strap, he looked at me, lit up with excitement and screamed "COOL!" Just an awesome moment to share with his family.

Wow, did you sit in on my presentation today? We joked about how there will be some guys here on suicide watch when it happens... But I did tell Chris that when there is a firm date, we'll let you guys know. But yeah, put in your orders now...