My data, it seems, does not play favorites. It doesn't even play nice. It is unable to discriminate between what would have been important to keep and those files I could give a damn about recovering. While my external hard drive remains in the care of the "disk doctor" for "further study", I've performed a variety of procedures on my once data-filled machine. Extraction. Recovery. Redundant file combination. While I've not isolated and recovered much data, I've acquired a new vocabulary in the process. I guess that's something.
I have managed, somehow, to recover many files. Are they files I wanted? Files I was desperate to recover? No. Instead, I've been left with a strange amalgam of information - visual, textual and other. There is no pattern, no logic I can find in what was spared and what is missing. I have the entire catalog of a terrible series of projects I did for a client, yet not a single photo of any vacation or important life event for the past eight years. Sections of short stories are combined with photos of my dogs in a mixed media exhibition staged by my computer. Illustrator files have wedding dress icons. Excel spreadsheets have flower illustrations embedded in them. All mp3s that I painfully loaded CD after CD for weeks at a time, are missing and have been replaced by Flash files containing the same names but no sound. Bjork tracks now look like Bjork videos...sans Bjork singing.
The loss is so complete, the salvage results so random as to leave one gutted. Utterly gutted. Yet there is such beauty in the remains that I feel certain there is meaning in the resulting chaos. A message to be decoded in the visual and textual recombinations of my former creations. I do not yet possess the mental acuity (and, let's face it, the emotional wherewithal) to formulate a secret key that might decrypt the artfully coded messages my computer has sent back from its own recycle bin grave. I feel certain, though, that I will. In time.
Until then, know this:
- Every file you delete lives; it lives on and on; if you are very lucky (or unlucky depending on what you're doing and on whose computer you are doing it) and it is not overwritten, it can be recovered - albeit in a somewhat more artful version of its former self
- If bullet one scares you and you have evidence to delete, purchase the appropriate software and reformat it, baby
- Savor every moment you happen to snap an image of because the image may not live on and it is up to you to keep the moment alive in your head, in your heart
- Please have redundant backups (and redundant and redundant some more) for your data - and don't ever, even for a moment, be foolish enough to think you can put it all in once place for only a few hours before re-distributing it back on your many backup locations; what can happen in those few hours may mean you lose everything
- Losing everything is quite freeing; while I don't recommend it, I can certainly see why some people choose it -- I can also see how survivors of fires, floods, hurricanes and other disasters pick up and carry on; if you are safe and the ones you love are fine, what's a little lost data in the end?
While I cannot guarantee there will be no more data woe-related posts in the near future (I have many interesting posts sketched out along the lines of "what does it mean that my computer deleted some short stories and not others?" and "nanowrimo as backup solution"), I have at least exorcised this painful demon enough to move past it. To move beyond the loss and the "how could I be so stupid" moaning into a more literary place. I'm ready to revisit Julavits. I'm ready to share my thoughts (with concrete examples!) on Pessl. I've got some things to say about other things. About books read and stories written. I may be dataless, but I'm not idealess. Cheeky, I know, but true. Consider this my final cry before taking up the literary crusade once more. A brief respite, the calm right before it gets really good. Again. Or. Finally. However you choose to view it.
