I lost a hard drive the other day. 15 Gigs of data containing everything digital that I had created in the last 5 years. From email to term papers, programs to stupid little unix hacks, everything I had done on my computer was gone.
The worst part about it is that this wasn't a hardware problem, the drive didn't crash. It was more of a misunderstanding in which I thought I had it backed up and proceded to reformat (5 times) the drive for use in a new machine. All of this could have been avoided if I wasn't a moron. I've never been big on backing up data, and I've heard the old adage about backing up data from the old time computer guru's; "There are two kind of people. Those who have lost data, and those who will." Guru's are guru's for a reason, I guess.
Now, the reason I wanted to post on this subject was not to tell everyone to back up their home directories. It's just that this was the first time I realized how much my computer reflected my life. Thinking about what I just lost, I saw that my computer was itself, the closest thing I had to an actual journal (aside from my few and far between anize posts.) It contained a pretty detailed record of everything I had done for the past half a decade. It contained enough information to decode what classes I was taking in a given semester, what personal interests I had, who I corresponded with, probably some passwords, and a whole mess of other goodies. If one were so inclined, they could probably put together a good picture of my life with all of this. Good thing I didn't sell that drive on EBay.
I haven't given up hope yet. There are a few things that I would really like to recover from that drive; namely my PGP key and anything from my address book. Wish me luck.
Posted by dbgrandi at September 2, 2003 04:16 PM | TrackBack