Data Separation Anxiety

I lost my data over the weekend, all of it. The various devices failed in succession, like one of those devastating combination blows that one sees on martial arts movies, one of those miracles of timing and choreography,the baddie in perfect position to receive, the hero sweating, bloody, swollen, but calling on his superior inner resources, calling on memories of his loved ones, living and dead, and in this way reaffirming even in close combat the idea of man as a social animal as he strikes home with a back fist to the sneering cheek, a wind-stealing hook to the gut, straight kick to the chest that sends the baddie groaning with sullen resignation, popeyed, through the bamboo walls of the pagoda and into fern-tickled unconsciousness.

First my laptop failed, and my calm, masterful retrieval of ERD commander, my determination to grab my data and resume writing, was foiled by the dreaded BSOD. Ah so. No way to boot the laptop even from a bootable CD. No way to recover anything then. Perhaps my hard drive was bad. This was certainly indicated by my frantic internet searches. And I hadn't backed up in so long! I spent the evening researching different methods of remediation. None quite answered my situation. I called my company's tech support and talked very earnestly to a bored Indian fellow whose grunts of affirmation came at odd times, suggesting a game of Tetris or Breakout in the background. I googled over and over, tried various bootable CDs. Finally, feeling dejected and fearing the worst, I went to lie in bed. There I remembered that I'd saved not only the latest version of my novel but a story that I really really liked onto a USB flash drive. So, I told myself, in the morning you'll have that. You can start with that. It was something. A comfort. It helped assuage to some small degree my creeping dread of being data-less, of starting over from scratch. I have not managed in my life to accrue even modest wealth, but I have been a consistent generator and collector of data and it gives me great comfort to be surrounded by all this hand-selected information. Now it was all gone. But there was that flash drive!

The next morning I went downstairs very early and put the flash drive into the computer, intending to copy the data to my RAID 1 backup device. I was going to back everything up religiously, starting now. The USB drive failed. It simply failed. Nothing could be retrieved. It was a this point that I began to look around, incredulous, waiting to hear a divine chortle, or for the camera crews to come bursting in and get a close up shot of my despair and disbelief. I think I began to mutter to myself. I know I pulled my hair quite a lot, and that I walked around shaking my head. Two failures in 12 hours! Who would have thought it possible? If only I, like the kung-fu villain, could be relieved of this burdensome consciousness, if only I could lie insensate on the forest floor! But no, I went on living every moment, one after the other, I went on with my metaphysical, paranoid speculations as to why, how, to what purpose, this had befallen me.