You’d think I’d have
learned my lesson. The last time it happened, I had “a feeling” a few hours
beforehand and backed everything up to a thumb drive—except my photos. I lost four
years of my girls’ childhood. Not many months later, I woke early with the same
feeling and hopped out of bed to grab a thumb drive and hurry downstairs. Too
late, that second time. I lost all the remaining digital photographs of my
kids, dating back to when we bought our first digital camera when my youngest
was six months old. I have no photos of Kayla from age six months through the
time she started school. Two crashed hard drives and years of visual memories are completely gone.
That second time, I
wept.
And now it happens
to me again, with no warning, no “feeling” to presage digital disaster. I did
back everything up—including photos—just a couple of months ago, before taking
my laptop in for service, but I haven’t backed up since.
- Gone: the NaNoWriMo manuscript
- Gone: All new writing from the past few months (which isn’t saying a lot—but I’ve written more in the last three weeks than I had for six months or more prior)
- Gone: materials developed for but not yet posted in my online thesis class
- Gone: my household budget spreadsheets for the next six months
This time, the hard
drive crashed near the conclusion of a big editing project. I was in the
process of transferring my proofreader’s corrections to my master copy, but I
lost only a few hours’ work and not a few weeks’ worth. Though I hadn’t backed
up my own stuff, I had backed up my client’s work.
When I learned the
drive was a total loss, I texted my sister-in-law, who is also a writer. She
replied, “So, are you okay? I would have a good angry. Ty.”
Then 30 seconds
later: “Cry”
I haven’t had a cry
at all, haven’t wanted to, but then I do keep my emotions well buried much of
the time. Even as I drove home from the Apple store, I felt I’d dodged a
bullet. I lost a manuscript assembled out of drafts and essays still wedged
here and there on thumb drives around my bedroom and study. I didn’t lose my
power to think and to articulate. I didn’t lose a job or a home or child or parent
or my husband. The loss of 5,000 or 8,000 words of new writing is far from a
fatal error.
Perhaps I have
finally, finally learned my lesson. I’ve installed a router that backs my work
up wirelessly every hour and will store 2 terabytes worth of data. (Uh, what
the heck is a terabyte?)
The blank hard drive
on the barren laptop before me feels kind of good. I’ve chosen as my new
desktop wallpaper a blue sky with whisps of white clouds and a white crescent
moon visible through the clouds. A small handful of folders and docs are hung
on those clouds, and I know the content of each and every one of them.
The file I’m working
on today holds this coming week’s guidance for my thesis students, to be posted
online tomorrow—essentially, I’ve written a blog post focused on our topic for
the week: the writing workshop. I’d drafted the first bits of the thesis
guidance last week, but instead of trying to remember and reconstruct, I
started from scratch. Wrote something brand new. And it’s good.
Perhaps I’m in
denial, but this loss seems small. I still have hundreds of pages of
drafts on those thumb drives. I still have the urge to put fingers to keyboard. This coming Wednesday night my best friend of thirty years is coming to see the girls’ Christmas Concert,
and on Thursday my eldest flies home for Christmas Break. The tree is up, and
the shopping is done. Our furnace works. The fridge is full.
My imagination and
memory are wide and deep. I am fifty-one years old. I’ve got more than enough new material—so much left to write and
not enough weeks and months and years left to write it all.
Good perspective, Lisa. We all need this reminder - as well as the reminder for the gifts in our life that haven't crashed.
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