The Death of a Hard Drive

Blog stats are a hell of an addition and my favourite part of them is the bit that tells you what people Googled to find your blog. One of the recent search terms:

“The way crazy people view the world.”

And I will tell you that I have a sort of pride over that. But here is a story that many of you will think me crazy for. “Rational, logical Jillian is insane,” you’ll say…

Last week, I was cleaning up my camera equipment when a question popped into my head, completely out of the blue, “If you had to choose, would you choose the photos or Mouse?”

This is Mouse:

“Mouse, of course,” I replied to myself and life went on.

Last night, I was working on backing up some of the folders on my external hard drive to DVDs. I have a rather methodological approach to backups and everything that’s on the external drive gets copied to two sets of DVDs, which are kept at opposite sides of the house. One in a fireproof box, the other on it’s own behind my stereo under an antique desk.

As I’m getting the transfers started, the external drive ejects itself from my Mac, then repeatedly tries and fails to connect. Finder was having none of this and restarted itself and then there I was with a brick of an external hard drive.

Two months worth of photos had yet to be backed up to DVDs. My own fault for falling behind, I know. *Poof!* and they were gone.

I cried. I sobbed. I whimpered. I spent a sleepless night trying to think of all the things I could try to recover the files, but none seemed to work when I repeatedly kept getting up at various hours to try. My only option is an expensive data recovery process.

And I won’t do it.

It’s not because of the money, it’s entirely because this morning I remembered the internal conversation I had with myself. It’s an odd thing to think about such a question in the first place and the fact that it happened a week before the external drive died has me a little suspicious.

Maybe if I had chosen my photographs, Mouse would have been hit by a car that night instead of the drive failing. Who knows?

And then, if I go now and get the data recovered, will I come home to find something happened to Mouse while I was gone?

It’s a question I can’t answer and a chance I can’t take. I’m sure some of you reading this are thinking, “Jillian?? That makes absolutely no sense.”

I will be the first to admit I have odd beliefs and superstitions. I can’t tell you how some of them came about because I don’t even know. If you know me well, you’ve probably seen a few of them in practice.

I’m not one to be afraid of “what ifs?” but there are some things in life that I’m not willing to take risks with. Mouse is one of them. So, until many years after she’s died of natural causes after a long, happy life, the external drive is going to be placed in a static-proof bag, stored in a box with a list of the folders I know I lost. Until she’s gone on her own, I’m not going to make any further efforts to resurrect the data from that drive. What I can copy from memory cards and the like, I will, but the drive will remain bricked.

I can always take more photos, but there will only ever be one Mouse.