As I mentioned in my previous post, of all of the deaths that have occurred recently, the death of my hard drive hit me the hardest. It was also the most unexpected. Talk about untimely. I only bought this laptop about seven months ago. Used though. But only slightly.
Thanks to my foresight in having married an alpha geek, I had a new (and more spacious) hard drive installed within days. But now I’m required to help my computer relearn the things it used to know. Kind of like recovering from a brain injury.
“This is a bookmark,” I tell it. “You use it to take me to a web page, so I don’t have to type in the URL every time.”
“This e-mail address I’m putting in your address book is one you used to know. It’s my best friend’s. You used it all the time; I can’t believe you forgot even her.”
“This program is called Microsoft Word. We’ll be doing a lot of therapy using Word. It’s what you need the most for my writing. Oh good, now that you’ve relearned that, I see you’re able to pull up the memory of my novel from the flash drive.”
A writer friend, upon hearing the news about my hard drive, said in an almost-stricken way “Please tell me you have your novel saved somewhere.” It’s nice when people understand.
Actually, I’d done an exemplary job of backing up my writing, so I lost almost nothing. Photos of my children, however…not as much. Bad mommy. Guilty mommy. I’m afraid some of the most important memories have been lost to permanent amnesia. I did have a lot of the pics saved, just not the same percentage I managed with my writing.
Then there were all of the cool quotations I had collected over the past few years. Ah well, time to get out of the old ruts and make some new ones anyway. And maybe time to develop better habits about backing up everything, not only my writing.
Nomadic Noesis 