My external hard drive that I had been using for backups died on me the other day. It theoretically is still under warranty, but I do not have all the original materials anymore except for the box; I ditched everything else when we moved to Seattle.
While nothing was truly earth shattering on it, it is still painful to lose; I must have had over 50GB of stuff on it since 1992… practically the stone age of computing (and data took up a lot less space then although most of the space is taken up by more recent files). I had all kinds of stuff: email archives, work journals (which would have been really helpful since I am looking for another job), tax and financial information, yadda yadda yadda.
No longer will I be able to reminisce about the times I spent less than $10 a week on food, how I went for years accounting for practically every penny I earned (I was usually off by around $5 per year), or how I spent almost $2000 on falafel and lentil soup in the time I lived in Ithaca. Or how about my old vax5 email I had at Cornell. Or my old bicycle riding records; I have ridden almost 10000 miles on my Trek 520 bicycle. OK, I am probably rounding up as it might be closer to 9000. But now I will never know!
Note: I still use Quicken for financial stuff, but I am much less meticulous about things as it is harder to do so when tracking stuff for two people, especially since Amanda and I have different ideas about how things should be organized:
Amanda: why do we need to know how much we spent on produce? beverages are not food, that’s why people say food AND beverages! Wine and beer should not be under Food; they should be under Hobby or even better Entertainment. And what is this Ether category?
Darren: Stimulants is too vague… why not just put coffee under Food:Dining? Surely those clothes are discretional spending. We can’t have things in multiple classes because then we don’t have a one-to-one relationship between things and the numbers won’t add up.
Anyway, I probably had all kinds of stuff on there that I have been dragging around. Silly (or not so silly) programs that I had written, random USENET postings, old college papers. Lists of all the books I owned (or used to own). A list of books piglet had peed on that I wanted to replace.
Then there are all the CDs I had losslessly ripped, but I can just do that again. And a lot of other random stuff I can also get again. That probably took up a lot more space, 100GB or more.
In previous years I had multiple hard drives in multiple computers where I backed everything up. Of course, when we moved I got rid of those. I had been meaning to get more redundant backup space, but I just hadn’t gotten around to it.
Oh, well. On the positive side of things, losing everything is strangely liberating, kinda like divesting oneself of possessions. I just mail ordered a bigger replacement. I considered getting a couple, but decided to wait until I figure out what kind of computer setup I want at home once I sent my two work computers back in a month.
I did have a separate backup of all the digital pictures I had taken (the originals). And of a few things like all my various accounts and passwords and whatnot in encrypted files. That info would have sucked to lose.
Alrighty, enough blathering. I still need to do a quick recap of the past few weeks.