Posted April 10, 2007, 12:23 am

Zeros and Ones

So it’s gone.

I know enough about computers that when I fuck something up just a little bit, in the process of trying to fix it I can open up the doors to fuck it up a whole lot. Here’s how such fucking went down.

The harddrive in my laptop was acting fishy, so I backed it up to a an external drive. I reformated the harddrive in my laptop to make sure that whatever weirdness was on there is totally gone. I was not just erasing all of my personal files from the past 8 years, but overwriting them with nothingness. Where there once was 10Gb+ of photographs there is now only the absence of light. Any audio recordings from the past 14 months have been replaced by deafening silence. Lyrics, essays, greatest of schemes and most transient thoughts have been deleted beyond the combined reach of a thousand Ctrl-Z’s. But not to worry, I backed it all up to my external harddrive.

Oh yes, I was ever so vigilant in my archiving of archives. Regularly enough, sometimes even twice weekly, I would update the backup of my laptop’s contents. I even made sure to turn the external harddrive off when it wasn’t in use, to pause the clock on its inherently limited physical lifespan. My father taught me the value of backups, I remember the first external drive he gave me, my vigilance would have made him proud. But no measure of vigilance or foresight could have saved this sinking ship, though I the captain knew not that it was going down.

The time came to restore my laptop’s harddrive from the copy residing on the external harddrive. The disk utility would not recognize the backup disk image, because it was a sparseimage, which like a normal disk image but put through one of those kitchen appliances that shrink wraps while sucking all the air out. I figured the solution would be to convert this sparseimage in to a legitimate disk image, one that could be read by the disk utility program. I set the dials, primed the flux capacitor, and double-checked my calculations. All was set with the best intentions.

An hour goes by as the last decade of my computer usage is supposedly copied from one intangible location to another, and then it is done. I return to find not two copies of my backup, as I had expected, but instead two copies of nothingness. In less than two hours I had overwritten not only my original copy of everything, but my extra-specially-safe copy of everything.

“Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

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