When men mess with their wife's computer or Where have all my movies gone?

So, my massive film archive is gone. Into the bit bucket, gone with the wind. A product of 6 years of careful and often difficult collecting, lovingly selected. Six years of films I will probably not be able to collect back in their entirety.

Bastard!

Basically several years ago Alan pressured, whinged, moaned, and talked me into getting a used but powerful development computer from the company he worked for before it went into Administration. Being basically a nice person I finally agreed and carefully transferred all my files to the new machine. My old laptop was then reconfigured for linux. All my films were neatly organised in a folder, cleanly named, and actually regularly watched. But then about 6 months ago Alan started hassling me that the big computer was using too much power and producing too much heat blah blah blah and I should trade it for his laptop that he wasn't using.

After dragging my feet for months he finally got so insistent and annoying that I stupidly gave in. It was one of those things were it was just not worth the cost to our relationship as he was making it into a cause celebre. Because the video files were so huge by this point, he brought home a portable drive for me to transfer my films onto. I copied all my video files onto the drive and then discovered that the laptop wasn't going to be able to hold them all. We agreed that I would get my own portable drive after I got back from NYC and the files could stay on the portable drive until then.Because it was really Alan's work portable drive, I did move 30 GB of files onto my laptop to free up some workspace for him. But my remaining stored files all had names like Barb's files to transfer - do not delete!

So I went away to NYC and when I got home, my computer had been wiped clean and re-installed/re-configured as a linux development machine. So ok, since then I have been sorting out and setting up my laptop and because WIN 7 is so very different than Win XP it wasn't until tonight that I reached almost the end of the alphabet - Videos - and discovered that about 80 GB of classic films, the most irreplaceable, rare, and cherished of my collection were MISSING ! So I went to the portable drive, figuring they were on that but no, nada, not there....

And yes, Alan had deleted them from the portable drive.

That's all I can say about this. I'm just stunned by it all.

To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong admit it;
Whenever you’re right shut up.


- Ogden Nash