March 8, 2010
I Lost All My Computer Files and Lived to Tell
Last week I was doing a bit of travel for my day job when disaster struck. I don’t know about you, but I see these new checked baggage fees as a CHALLENGE. As God as my witness, I will NEVER pay a fee for my checked bag. No, no I will not.
And it was exactly this stubbornness that set me up for the Great Baggage Robbery of 2010. There I was at the airport with several bags when the woman at check-in explained that I could only check one bag for free. I quickly crammed what I could into my luggage–including my work laptop and my digital camera–and condensed everything else into my carry-on bag. Voila.
It wasn’t until I arrived back home at 1am and began to blearily unpack my luggage when I found the first clue: an empty digital camera case. I turned to the Mr. and said, “Was my camera stolen?” But just as soon as I got that sentence out, an even scarier thought hit me. WHO CARES ABOUT THE CAMERA! YOUR WORK LAPTOP WAS IN THERE!!!!!!
Yup. Gone. Probably at this moment it’s found a new owner via Ebay. I took the news fairly well at first. The Mr. convinced me that I’d be able to access my work email folders and would probably be able to recover most of my documents. He also assured me I wasn’t going to be fired–which had definitely crossed my mind.
The next day I went to work with my tail tucked between my legs and confessed my sins to my boss. He was very cool about it and told me to work on the loaner laptop until my new one arrived. We both agreed that it was very fortunate that my job gave me zero access to important docs and he lectured me about never, ever packing my work laptop in my check baggage again.
I sat down and logged into my email, feeling mostly better. But the funny thing was, all my email folders were gone. Well, this must be a mistake, I told myself. I called the IT department and they told me that no, it wasn’t. Apparently my email folders were not saved on the server. They were saved on my actual laptop. They were gone. Forever. In fact, all of my files were gone, never to return.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hang up and begin sobbing at my desk. I now only had the emails in my inbox and Sent items–and those folders only go back about a month. I’ve been at my company a long, long time. I save and file every single document ever. I’m a nut for organized digital folders. And all of it was gone in the blink of an eye. And no, thank you for asking, I never backed up.
The rest of the week was one of the most disorienting periods of my life. I kept telling people, It feels like I moved and none of my boxes showed up. Or, It almost feels like my house burned to the ground. Whoever saw me walking around like some shattered person immediately stopped what they were doing and backed up their computer.
The next few days are a blur, and that crying incident referenced above did not prove to be an isolated one. But slowly I recovered. I had people send me files I had sent them. I was able to re-create an alarming amount of data from memory. And eventually my new work laptop arrived.
Now that I have some distance from the incident, it has started to make me think. Obviously no one died and I didn’t lose my job. There are much, much worse things that could happen to me. And yet the pain of this incident was very real to me. It’s hard to describe how disorienting it is to lose access to documents you created, to the records you carefully saved for a rainy day. It’s a very strange modern-day anguish.
My sweet husband assured me that my reaction was not out of proportion. In fact, he informed me, there are therapists now who specialize in helping people cope with a massive loss of digital data. I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but I can tell you it might have been good for me to talk to a trained professional.
The feeling of loss was so acute at the time, and yet now I’m fine. What I’m discovering is about 99% of what I had, I didn’t really need. Knowing that those documents were there gave me a strange sense of security but I never really used them. The 1% I lost and could not recover–that was painful. But 1% is the kind of thing you can deal with.
I don’t think ever in our human history we’ve kept such detailed records of our lives. I almost never talk on the phone anymore. I just email my friends and family, and all the while Gmail is saving every last letter of it. Better still, should I want access to these conversations, I can just search for a keyword and they’ll pop right up. And perhaps this makes us feel a little less temporary, a little safer about our time here on Earth. When all my records disappeared, it was the thought of them being gone that disturbed me. It’s not like I really needed them for some pressing task. Well, most of them anyway.
I’m not completely sure I’ve fully digested exactly what my reaction to this event meant, but the one thing I definitely learned was: back up your computer. For the love of all that is sacred, stop what you’re doing right now and back it up. Someday you’ll thank me.
Anne and I are very late and somewhat reluctant adopters of Facebook. 
Last weekend I realized something scary. I now need a full day from sun up to sun down to do all my chores. When did this happen? My husband, bless his heart, does half the chores so it’s not like I’m doing more than my fair share. It’s just that there are more of them now. Or perhaps my standards of cleanliness have changed.
