Too Long Away

OK, so I've been away longer, far longer, than expected. I really have no excuse. Well, no excuse except for the dog that chewed on my computer's power cable. That's particularly annoying, because I don't even have a dog.

Anyway, the dog chewed on the power cord to my laptop. The computer screen flashed and then went dark, even as the dog lit up like a 50-pound furry sparkler. I hadn't realized that my laptop drew that much current.

So, to make a long story short enough to be interesting, the computer was DOA. Doggy electrical trauma was not something it could have survived, I guess. The dog was singed around his muzzle and, oddly enough, his hind end, but otherwise all right. Well, whenever he got near a floor lamp, it did tend to get really bright, but otherwise, he was OK.


And then he just vanished. To this day, I don't know where he came from, or even what his name was. I didn't think dogs could be that stealthy.

At this point, I'm left with a dead laptop and the task of trying to recover my data. My pictures. My writing. Emails from the last five or six years. All my videos. My life.

Have you ever had an extended period of amnesia? That's what I felt like as I confronted the possibility that I had just lost the last five or six years of my digital life. Why hadn't I listened to what all the experts have been saying all this time - it's not if you'll lose data, but when?

The hard drive was the first thing I had to remove to see if that data was still accessible. If I could read it on another computer, I was within arm's reach of getting my data back. Fortunately, the laptop was easy to open, and the scorch marks around the power port didn't extend to where the hard drive was. I was really beginning to feel optimistic.

Unfortunately, my optimism was not to be worth anything. Do you know what it's like to put a hard drive into a SATA "boot" - a dock that contains the necessary interface for power and data for SATA hard drives, connected to a host computer - and have the computer not even recognize the presence of the drive? The feeling is beyond helping with a string of curses. Your shoulders fall, you exhale noisily, and then you begin to weep - that last part is optional, but totally appropriate.

On the other hand, not having all that digital data can be viewed as a form of liberation. It's somewhat akin to a major house cleaning, although of a rather catastrophic kind. You can view it as some people do whose homes have been destroyed by a hurricane or a wild fire or some other natural disaster. For these hardy souls, it's time for a new beginning. The slate has been wiped clean, and as sad as that may be, they embrace the opportunity to begin anew, to reinvent themselves.

I guess I should view this incident like that. And so I'm beginning anew, with a series of new posts to this blog, and to my other one as well. But first, I must make a confession.

There was no dog. There was no catastrophic hard drive crash, or sparking computer. All my data is intact.

What I've written is a fictionalized account of what can happen to any computer user. Our data is fragile, like writing on soap bubbles. If you aren't careful, it can *POP* and be lost forever. And that's why the point of this little excursion into fantasy is to remind myself, and anyone else who might read this, of the need to back up your data, locally, in multiple forms, and remotely, using a cloud-based service like Dropbox or Box or Skydrive or Mozy.

More and more our digital lives are scattered across multiple locations - social networks, email servers, remote backup services, work computers, personal computers, game consoles, tablets, smartphones, digital cameras, whatever. Keeping track of these bits and pieces can become a full-time pursuit, but we have to do it, if we're going to keep our lives from fragmenting into a shower of bytes. We should probably explore ways to do this in the future. I will try to address that aspect of the tech side of writing in the next few posts.