It has been probably about a month, but I’m still trying not to think about the mess of computer parts on my bedroom floor. In particular, a dead 1Tb drive that contains over ten years of accumulated data.

dead

And of course, like a proper person involved with computers, I tell people to make backups all the time, but is there a backup for this drive? Ha. Funny story: I was upgrading the firmware on my NAS to enable S3 backup when the HDD died. There may have been cosmic levels of rage when I discovered it was dead, but I could only maintain that for five or ten minutes because I still had work to do. Now that I’m in something of a fallow period (the trip to China isn’t going to happen at this point), I have time to come back to it.

Initial attempts to resuscitate the drive have not gone well; I suspect that I may have already wrecked things with a wild fsck. I forgot the first rule - make a disk image if you can. Right now, I’ve put it through the chamber vacuum sealer and thrown it in the freezer for the last attempt to save it tomorrow before I give it up for good.

The worst thing is that I really don’t know the extent of what I’ve lost. I know that there were rare films, TV shows, and comics on there, which is annoying but not entirely irreplaceable (the complete works of Grant Morrison! Including Near Myths and Steed & Mrs. Peel!). But I had also used it as a place to store things like the Quartz Composer installations I’d made to relieve space on my newer SSD setups. Some of that may be recoverable from my Time Machine backups. If I’m lucky.

It’s not as bad as the black mold in the basement on Trinity. But I can’t help the feeling of loss, even if it is just a bunch of zeros and ones on an ext3 filesystem.

But, like a good British person, I will go back to repressing it and lining up the torrents to rebuild.