What I Learned from (Almost) Losing All My Lifetime Photos

Thanks to smartphones, I became quite addicted to taking photos. Photos from everything—places I walk through daily, food, street art, people, and especially all the descriptions in museums, churches, and other sites I visit while traveling, which I fear I’ll never read. Unlike the past, when we were limited to 24 or 36 pictures on a trip to Europe, the sky is the limit now.

As a result, I accumulated over 1 terabyte of pictures and short videos—around 200,000 in total. But instead of trusting cloud storage (yes, I know, a bit paranoid, but I admit it), I kept them all on an external hard drive and the more recent ones on my laptop. Everything was organized by place and date—something that took me months, especially after a previous hard drive erased all the filenames by an error.

Then one day, in a second, my life changed. I accidentally reformatted the hard drive containing 20 years of my life, captured through photos. I deleted EVERYTHING.

The feeling was similar to what I experienced during a car accident—everything seemed to move in slow motion. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw a pop-up saying I had 1 terabyte of free space on what was once a full hard drive.

I didn’t know what to do—scream, smash the computer, jump out the window, or rewind time. Instead, I was paralyzed, in complete shock.

But I couldn’t stay in that state forever. So, I relied on my meditation practice, Buddhist teachings, and faith in God to guide me through this crisis.

To spare the details of how many people I consulted, how many free tools I tried (unsuccessfully), and how many days I spent scanning the drive to see what I could recover, I’ll just say that those were miserable, frustrating, and deeply sad days.

After all that effort, I barely recovered half of the files—many in poor condition. And there’s one final, irritating detail: I retrieved around 100,000 files, some of which are duplicates (don’t ask me why), and none of them have names or dates.

Looking at the mess, I realized I will have years of entertainment ahead figuring out whether a monkey in a photo was from a trip to Indonesia, Brazil, or Thailand, or whether the sea in the background was in Spain or somewhere else. And that’s not even considering the endless pictures of food, people, and coffee cups.

I couldn’t accept that this misery was for nothing, so I started to reflect on why this happened and what I could learn from it.

The "Why" – Perhaps to Learn These Lessons

Lesson 1: “Enough is enough.”

In my obsessive pursuit to restore the past—to recover my perfectly organized 20 years of photos—I drained my energy, money, and patience. I endlessly searched for solutions, spent weeks scanning the drive, and endured repeated system crashes that forced me to start over from scratch after 72 hours of scanning and almost 95% completed. I couldn’t stop myself. I even ruined part of my vacation in Brazil, glued to the computer because I felt like I had to fix the problem immediately.

In hindsight, I wasted so much valuable time chasing perfection, which doesn’t exist. Perfection is an ideal. If I had accepted a reasonable outcome early on, I would have suffered less. I’ve learned that not everything is within my control, and there’s a limit to how much I can fix. Knowing when to stop would have saved me a lot of frustration.

Lesson 2: Acceptance.

When you recognize your limits and specially the balance between effort and reward, you become more flexible in accepting a fair outcome. In situations beyond your control—like this one—it's important to know when you’ve done enough and let go. This can feel counterintuitive in a society that constantly pushes us to do more, be more, and take full responsibility for our successes and failures. But that’s not always true. Sometimes, things don’t work out, and it’s not entirely your fault. Learning to accept the outcome and move forward is healthy.

Lesson 3: Prioritization.

It’s not rocket science to identify your priorities, at least rationally. But we often lose sight of them when hidden beliefs and emotional triggers come into play and distort our sense of what really matters. In this case, my visible priority was recovering the photos. But at what cost? I sacrificed valuable time with my family during vacation because I couldn’t stop myself. Why? Because I believed, deep down, that "I can’t give up as long as there’s hope." That belief led me to obsess over fixing the problem, days in a row. If I had been more aware of this internal drive for control and perfection, I could have made better decisions about how much time and energy to invest.

I hope this small domestic tale resonates with you if you ever find yourself stuck in a situation that’s draining your energy because you believe you’re the only one who can solve it.

Wishing you a great weekend—and keep your photos safe!