Down the Toilet

I faced a difficult modern challenge this week that involves mourning the loss of all the items I had saved electronically over the last 20 years. I was starting to not trust my computer so much 2 years ago so I got an external hard drive (because it was WAY more affordable than a new computer) & transferred everything to it since it was a TB: pictures, journals, all of my music, and I had started writing a book I kept on there, the book I've been wanting to write for years. I'm not sure why I didn't keep my files on both the computer and the external hard drive. No explanation is good enough now but I guess part of the reason is that I'd never lost electronic information before so I didn't realize just how devastating it could be. I didn't think of it as a likely problem. I downloaded a few high-rated recovery programs & got nothing. I took the drive to Best Buy-couldn't fix it. I found a high-rated affordable place in California to send it and they said it was over their capabilities but referred me to another place that is crazy amazing. I had to spend $300 for damaged parts for them to try but ultimately, nothing could be recovered and I'm out of options. I found out the final call yesterday. This process took months and I didn't allow myself to think much about losing everything. I clung to a kernel of hope until now there is none. I can't even describe how upset I am.

I keep relatively detailed journals that I referred to for a variety of things over the years. Family would sometimes ask when certain things occurred and I could go back & find accurate answers. The last journal I printed was halfway through 2009 so 10 years of details is gone.

Pictures from the last 20 years are gone.

I keep wanting to hear songs, some of them a little obscure, and all of my music files are gone. I have accumulated a good deal of free music, when what I want is available through the library free downloads but over the years, I've probably spent a few hundred dollars on mp3s that are gone.

Starting over feels daunting. There's a part of me now that thinks, "Why put in the effort? It could just disappear for good anyway." The part of me that realizes that life must go on sees it a little bit another way. I try to be clean and organized but life gets crazy and stuff gets scrambled and sometimes I think I'm not doing as good as I'd like with getting rid of as much as I should. However, if there were some kind of emergency and our home or stuff got ruined, it would be hard but it would also be a clean slate. I guess I should think of electronics the same way. I just electronically got a clean slate. The little thing that upsets me most though is that I don't think I was sold a legitimate product in the first place. It was a Seagate brand drive. I ordered it off Amazon and made sure to buy it directly from the real company itself. I thought this was how to make sure I got the product I thought I was getting. I got the product & used it and everything was working for a while. There were no red flags that there was a problem. I never opened the enclosure to the drive, just for kicks or anything like that. I had never opened one before & didn't believe I had any reason to. When communicating with recovery companies, they asked for the serial number & then sent me pictures of the serial number sticker on the same kind of external hard drives but mine had none whatsoever and had never had one while in my possession. Also as recovery professionals handled the drive, they found it had been opened aggressively & they found fingerprints all over it.

I hadn't even ever opened the enclosure before it crashed so clearly, I would not have handled it in a way that would have resulted in fingerprints. It was past the warranty period so I didn't have that on my side but I contacted Seagate because I believed they had sold me a product that had been compromised from the beginning. Contacting them was a nightmare, especially since the most efficient method required me to put in the serial number, which was missing from my product so I could never complete that method. They just sent me some generic e-mail about sorry for my experiences. We learn from our mistakes faster than our successes & I can promise I won't make the same mistake again. It's just felt like a very big loss to me, so much of the details of my life have just been flushed away.