Told You So
Last weekend I lost digital information. Thankfully, not a lot of digital information. I’ve had a new laptop for a few months now so the majority of information I had on it was copied over from a memory stick. New information consisted of downloaded images, some research information, and about two months’ worth of writing. It could have been much worse. The writing was a short story that was quickly approaching novella length. Had it remained a short story, I might not have been so upset but it had taken on a life of its own and grew. I lost it and for most of Sunday, I was devastated.
Over the last two months, I kept getting messages to upgrade to Windows 10. Last Sunday I decided to try it. The first change I noticed after I completed the update was the lack of information in my documents. My first thought was what an idiot I was for not having any of it backed up somewhere else. I then had a panic attack for about fifteen minutes while sitting at my desk staring at an empty directory on the screen all while hearing imaginary voices tell me “I told you so.” It was probably a good thing they were imaginary voices or I might have flung the nearest available object toward those voices. That very well could have been a lamp, my computer, a book…
After I calmed down (yeah, right), I found a few websites that told me the files should be stored under a certain user directory and that is where I found them. Evidently I was not the only idiot to lose files after upgrading to Windows 10. I then “moved” them back to the documents folder. I had been given a second chance! For some reason, I had to reboot one more time for the install to be complete and the first thing I noticed after rebooting was the document file was empty again. So was the original user directory where I had found the missing files. I guess I should have “copied” them there. Or quickly backed them up. Hindsight is… never mind. Idiot.
I’ve lost things before. Physical things. Although I might have been upset at the time, I moved on knowing whatever I lost might reappear someday. Physical matter just doesn’t disappear all by itself. Except socks and I think I covered that once before. When it comes to technology, I thoroughly understand mechanical things, most likely because I work in a mechanical world. Things don’t disappear. The digital world is something completely beyond my comprehension despite the fact that I depend on it for so much both at a professional and personal level. I bet we all do.
So, most of the tech savvy people I know and especially the IT people I work with would be asking me why I didn’t back up the data somewhere, or more importantly, why I was not backing it up each time I updated something. At a minimum, my WIP and a budget spreadsheet, both files I actively write to throughout the week. Great question and I have no answer. It’s not like I didn’t have an opportunity to back everything up. For a few years, my wife had been urging me to back up the digital pictures we have but I always felt safe having them on the computer and I had backed them up to discs once. One day I took a look at how many digital photographs we had stored and realized the majority of pictures we have of our kids were on our computer. About a month before I got the new laptop, I bought an external hard drive and backed up every picture we had along with all our pictures from our phones. I should have backed up every directory and not just pictures.
The Cloud
There are other options too. When I got the new laptop, I opted to get a new version of Office. I looked online and thought I might try Office 365 which would continually give me access to the latest and greatest version of Office. It also pointed me towards other features I have never used: OneDrive. This is one of the advantages of having this particular package. Access from anywhere. Files and working documents stored in the cloud. Or is it on the cloud? Whatever. I was not going to use that feature.
What the hell is the cloud? I don’t understand where I store information now and I can see the computer or memory stick or external hard drive it is being stored on. I can’t see the cloud. Well, that’s not completely true. I see clouds all the time, I just don’t see storing information there. Maybe the nomenclature itself resonates a not-so-secure connotation. A cloud is open and airy, here one moment then gone the next. Who was the marketing genius that came up with that name?
Faith
Then I had a vision. I use a cell phone. Both my television programming and internet service in my home come from two satellite dishes on my roof because that is all that we have available out where I live. No cable, no DSL, no physical or hard wired connection other than the cables running from the two dishes into my house. I have a modem, a router, a network booster for our cell phones, something called a genie DVR that lets me watch shows I record on multiple televisions throughout the house. I’m typing on a laptop this very moment, using Wi-Fi. I text my wife and kids all the time. I see the physical devices but I don’t see or understand how the data travels from one place to the other. But it does, and I have faith in that despite the fact I don’t truly understand it or, see it.
My connections to information
Now for my WIP. Thankfully it was not the novel and I had a version of it still stored on our desktop computer, albeit a few months old and thousands of words lighter. There are greater tragedies right? I copied it back over to my laptop and with everything still fresh enough in my mind, I’ll be able to recover and get back to where I was. I also copied everything to our external hard drive. Lastly, I copied it to the cloud. Faith.
Lesson learned.
B
images courtesy of Pixabay, Amazon (I bought that drive so … great deal), and from mentioned drive
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