Memory Loss

I was in an internet cafe this morning, feeling crappy and depressed. I woke up this morning with a head full of heavy thoughts about my future travel plans,  feeling worried.

I connected my hard disk to the computer and as what often happens I spent a good hour wrangling with it to try and view files. On newer computers it seems to work fine, whereas older ones insist on throwing wobblies.

Saying things like ‘your drive will work faster if you plug it into a high speed usb port’.  How about I will work faster if I throw the computer in the bin.

Suddenly a different error message came up saying:
f: drive inaccessible – disk corrupted, data unreadable.

After numerous repeated attempts and controlled clicking fits, a feeling of nihilistic hopelessness washed over me. Could it really be possible that i’d lost all my photos, music, research?

Doing a quick search of the error message on google, my heart sank as I read tales of people being able to ‘salvage some files’ or ‘total data loss’.

I tried a different pc, the same message occurred. This usually means say goodbye to your life.

I resisted taking out my anger on the poor guy running the internet cafe. It’s wasn’t his fault he had malicious computers (or was it? – maybe he did it to spite people, randomly cross-wiring and resoldering the motherboards to see what happened).

Anyhow, I rolled away feeling jittery and panicky, running through all the ways I was probably never going to see most of my photos again other than the ones I’d already uploaded.

I once spoke to a photographer friend who told me to keep all my photos, and definitely don’t delete any looking at the little preview screen on the camera unless they are blurry.

To cut a long story short or ‘Bref’ as the French so succinctly put it, I found another internet cafe, went in plugged in my hard disk…

and it works.

So, time to back up my hard disk, stop moping around and feeling sorry for myself, and get back on the road and the bike….

give me strength…

Oh and by the way, don’t store your life on a disk drive.