03 – Most People Are “Happy Accidents”

When it comes to digital data, pictures are pretty high on the list of “most irreplaceable files”. Unless you run your business from your computer, I would be inclined to bet that the majority of people, when asked about backing up their data, would be most concerned about their photos. I would have agreed, and over the years I have spent countless hours backing up, organizing, and transferring my precious memories. I have worked on them during states of altered consciousness, such as when tired or drunk, and since I started collecting digital photos, I never lost any. In fact, I would usually be so cautious that I ended up with tens of thousands of duplicate files before I started using a duplicate file finder.
Be that as it may, yesterday I lost my entire digital collection, photos and all. This is the second time this has happened in my life, and the first time with digital photos.
The details about how it happened are unimportant. Suffice it to say, I was performing a disk management procedure I have done thousands of times, and I have always been aware that if I did it wrong I risk loosing data. In 26 odd years I never made that mistake and even if I had, most of the time I had multiple copies around, which was usually the result of being in the middle of transferring and not from good planning.
One moment of carelessness, combined with always encrypting my hard drives, a failure to maintain a second backup, and apparently the way modern hard drives work (wear leveling and TRIM), meant over two decades of files are gone. I have forgotten about a lot of what I have lost, I am sure.
When I was young, I was amazed to learn how hard drives worked. Back then, internal hard drives had spinning discs and the data was saved magnetically. They were kinda like record players, in that they also had an arm with a sensor at th03 – Most People Are “Happy Accidents”e end, which would move in relation to the disk to find the data requested. When something was deleted, rather than use all that time and energy to overwrite the area of the disk, an entry was made in an index simply stating that the file has been deleted. File recovery was a straightforward process, and I used programs like testdisk and photorec (linux data recovery programs) successfully over the years to find lost files.
I have been trying everything I can think of, and the only thing that is resulting in anything is an old hard drive I used to store pictures on a long time ago. Photorec is finding tens of thousands of files, however as I sort through them, 95% of them were photos I had backed up for my brother in law, and here and there were some that I was definitely not meant to see, if you know what I mean. I wish I didn’t have to sort through a ridiculous amount of files which, after being extracted with photorec, no longer have organization or filenames, just dump after dump of miscellaneous pictures.
I sought help online and was told that I should seek professional assistance (beyond psychological). While I am sure they have techniques I don’t know about and programs that cost a lot of money, I do not feel that if I spent the money that they would be able to undo my mistake. A combination of some time and a significant amount of data being written after the mistake means that it is just gone. I have been cycling through different feelings as I come to accept this.
One of the feelings is of relief. My picture archive has taken so much of my time and energy, and there was always so much work to be done, it seemed like it would never be finished. When I was young, I used to travel around a lot, and I would frequently reduce my possessions down so that I could carry them all. It always felt so freeing, and I feel the same way now, even though I know I will be sad that I don’t have them in the future.
I guess I have been given the opportunity to protect and store my data better, and maybe I can pass that knowledge to someone else at some point. I am learning about RAID backups, filesystems that use copy-on-write and snapshots which protect data, and I am working on a system to automate a home cloud that all of the computers will back up to automatically, which in turn will be periodically backed up an additional time.
My backup hard drive was like a junk drawer. I had been collecting so much random information for so many years, I never was going to get through all of it. Now that I “get” to start over, I am discovering all kinds of programs and techniques to help keep everything in it’s place so that I can find it when I need it instead of just causing me headaches.
Just like most people you know, I now consider this giant mistake a “happy accident”.