Forget it

About two weeks ago one of my hard drives crashed.  Without warning, it just quietly died.  My first reaction was disappointment followed by frustration as I started the long list of possible reasons it died.  It's an external hard drive so there are a few things I had to rule out.  After going through the list there's only one possible reason left and to verify it I had to order some spare parts online.  They haven't arrived yet but if they don't work then the drive is lost to me and all the data on it.

There was about 500 GB of data on the drive, and initially the big things that have been lost sprang to mind, ISOs for various pieces of software I use - some of those are backed up thankfully, some are not.  My entire music collection which was about 15 GB that was perhaps the first thing I thought of, some of it I can get back from iTunes, and the physical stuff too but a lot of it I can't get back - not through any legal means.  For the music at least I've resorted to Spotify for the time being.  The things that have hit home the hardest though are the things you can't replace.  Photos and Videos mainly of people, places, and things from years gone by.

I know what you're thinking - it's my fault for not backing it up.  Well the thing is, the hard drive was the backup.  A few months ago I backed everything up to it before upgrading to Windows 10, I deleted partitions on my hard drive and moved things around then installed Windows 10, since then I hadn't got round to copying everything back onto the PC, partly because I was unsure of Windows 10 at first and partly because it was more convenient to keep it on the external drive.

What has been lost though is quite a lot of irreplaceable data.  Beyond the photos and videos I mentioned, everything from my University years, and my College years was on it, both work and play.  There were also a lot of things I wrote, as some of you will be aware I am a writer, I do write much more than this blog.  The published works at least I could get back from Amazon Kindle's Publishing centre so I have copies of those, but it was the unfinished, and unpublished work that I lost, including a novel I've been writing for the last 2 years.  I have older copies of it backed up in other places but I've lost the last 6 chapters or so because I neglected to update the backups.

This whole experience has made me re-evaluate what data I hold onto myself.  I used to be quite against cloud storage but reluctantly I have moved to it now for some data that's not confidential as such.  One of the more unusual things I lost in this experience is people.  I don't keep every phone number I ever had in my phone, the people I didn't speak to anymore I deleted from the phone long ago.  Their numbers however were in a spreadsheet and there's no prizes for guessing where that was saved.  To be clear none of the numbers I lost were people I contact regularly anymore.  It's interesting for me to sit and ponder though that without those numbers I have now been completely cut off from them.  For a handful that's for the best.  For the rest I don't know what to think.  For a few I am down about losing, but at the same time the fact that we haven't spoken in a while is telling me to let it go. 

To give a rough idea of figures, I have made some estimations:

Music: 5,000 mp3 files roughly, this isn't my entire music collection as I had deleted a tonne a while ago.

Writing: This one is harder to estimate, my shortest novel is 10,500 words roughly and there's a few others, coupled with archived blog posts [from other blogs no longer active] plus my coursework from University, College, and my dissertation.  In all I would estimate around 1 million words of writing would be conservative.

Photos: This is about 1,000 which thanks to my social media abstinence [with the exception of Twitter] can't be found anywhere else.

Videos: These were never uploaded there weren't many, about 10 if even that.

Software: The biggest chunk of this is about 50 GB of Microsoft applications I got for free from Microsoft through MSDNAA which you can't access anymore once your account closes after graduation so I can't recover any of this.

Phone numbers: There's about 100 of those, but in all honesty I am not that fussed about the majority, we haven't spoken in years anyway and it's unlikely I would have contacted them.  There's about 10 guys though I feel sad about losing.  One or two I had crushes on, one or two I was a lot closer than that with at one point but we drifted apart for various reasons.  One of them made it quite clear he didn't want to speak to me again anyway.

This is where the question of forgetting things comes into play.  There's a lot I have lost because of this but a lot of it is just data that I was holding onto - hoarding if you will.  For the music at least, Spotify is doing its best right now, I've even discovered some new music with it which has managed to lift my spirits to the point where I am considering paying for premium - I'm not entirely sure it's worth it for me though as the adverts aren't that invasive after a while you forget about them.  The things I wrote I can write again, they may not be as good, they may be better, they will be what they will be. The memories of the people and places I went to will remain even if I don't have the photos and videos anymore.  In a way this is making me question the permanence of digital data versus the fading of memory - we forget the things that aren't that important, maybe some data should be the same, maybe you should just forget it.