I’m Rob Lee, and I’m asking for your urgent help to recover what I lost when a thief stole my backpack in a brief moment at Starbucks. I'm a single, almost 70-year-old retired software developer, photographer, and writer living only on Social Security. Inside that backpack was a major investment in new gear, vital for me to earn beyond Social Security in the coming years. But the true, devastating loss was the data on the disk drives—years of my life's work that I had just off-loaded from the cloud. To recover, I am urgently trying to raise $14,000.

In the brief moment I stepped away and then looked back, I recognized the backpack was gone and only my coffee remained. I opened the tracking feature on my iPhone as I ran outside of the store to see where the person I suspected went. It showed my stuff in the parking lot, just a few feet away in an empty parking spot. A call to 911 quickly brought police onto the scene of this active robbery, and they awaited the next sighting of my stolen property in the app. A digital chase ensued overnight through four police jurisdictions as the computer popped up and moved on. I personally rendezvoused with police in each jurisdiction to aid the apprehension, but the thief managed to stay ahead of us for over 18 painful hours. At the last location reported, four sheriffs searched the car and home there, finding nothing, and none of it has been seen since.

In the data was over 200,000 photos and videos from more than 5 years and 140,000 miles of travels across the United States—all destined for books and galleries, and now they are gone forever. Also lost were irreplaceable family videos and photo scans dating back over 70 years. These archives not only documented my mother's compelling story of meeting her Army husband in Berlin in the 1950s, but they also chronicled my own unique origin story. This entire legacy must now be redone at significant cost and labor.

This theft has created a devastating setback in terms of finances, labor, and the immense expense of data restoration and work re-creation. Your support isn't just replacing gear; it's helping me, a 70-year-old on a fixed income, rebuild my ability to earn and secure my family's history.

Here is how the $14,000 will be used, in order of priority:

You can visit my website Rob Lee Photography to learn about the apps that I created and my photography endeavors that were devastated by the theft.

Please donate and share my story. Your compassion will allow me to turn this crushing setback into a second chance.