Failure to Launch

The worst thing imaginable just happened to me: my hard drive died.

Okay, “died” sounds too final when I haven’t even attempted to bring it back to life. (I would say it’s in purgatory right now.) Actually, I don’t care very much for the device itself, but I absolutely need to retrieve the data therein. Unfortunately, there was no foreboding of its demise. One day it was working perfectly, the next day it was kaput. I should have known better to back up my files but I guess that’s a big lesson learned for next time. My hard disk has served me well for two years, but its contents span more than a decade.

Technology is said to be an extension of man. You know how the cellphone is an extension of the hand or how the wheel is an extension of the foot? Well, my hard drive was a supersized extension of my memory. It contained practically everything that I had seen, heard, read, and experienced. All the pictures I’ve taken, videos I’ve shot, stuff I’ve written, websites I’ve designed – all gone.

Without my hard drive I feel powerless and paralyzed, as though a part of me were missing. I was telling a friend that it was my personal horcrux. After all, this hard drive did contain my life – no, this drive was my life. I’ve already done my research on how to salvage the data and will give it a go once I obtain an eSATA to SATA cable (CD-R King mistakenly issued me just an eSATA cable). Oh boy this procedure needs to work because I just can’t live with the idea of losing more than a decade’s worth of data. That would mean losing an essential part of myself.