Without A Trace

Our world has been transformed by the digital age. Information is widely and easily accessible, stored as zeros and ones on magnetic media. Virtually all knowledge, communications and memories, from the latest world news to your most prized picture, can be summoned at the click of a mouse or a press of a key. Easily. Conveniently. Volumes which used to take up hundreds of notebooks, scrapbooks, photo albums, videotapes and pieces of paper are stored and organized on something not much larger than a matchbook.

It can be very catastrophic when that matchbook malfunctions with absolutely no warning. Like when a mechanical failure occurs to your hard drive in the middle of web surfing.

There was no noise, no odd behavior...nothing. As soon as I clicked on a link, my somewhat untrusty G3 iMac began to show the "beach ball of doom" for a few seconds...a few minutes...much too long for it to be normal. as per usual, I went to do a force quit. I couldn't. The computer had completely frozen. Time for a reboot.

The familar chime of a Mac reboot came up, and then came the first warning. No...not a warning. That would imply advance notice. The first sign of the end. The hard drive made an amazingly loud knock, and was heard trying to spin up, but couldn't. Then, the dreaded question mark came on screen. My stomach dropped.

I tried to reboot again and again, hoping that the computer would find the system folders, but realizing it was possible that I could be making it worse. Nothing. Not a damn thing. Same knock. Same question mark. And once again, I cursed this computer, being the only Mac I've ever had to cause me as many problems as it has (display failure, RAM failure, logic board failure...you'd think I would have wised up and gotten something new).

My trusty Mac shop couldn't help me. They referred me to the "gods of digital retrieval." Well, if it's good enough for Sean Connery, it's gotta be good for me. Then they came back with a phone message AND an e-mail messgae to call them immediately.

It was gone. Wiped clean. The mechanical failure had demagnitized the disk so that there was nothing to retrieve.

Addresses. Maps. Web page bookmarks. Drink recipes. Mp3s. E-mails from when Amy was born. Pictures of Christie's fifth birthday party. All wiped away as if they never existed. Without a trace.

My hard drive destroyed itself two days after I put off backing up out of sheer laziness. Never has that laziness cost so much.