Long, hard day today, starting with an e-mail I was sending to the group I shared a table with at last week’s Stephen Ministry conference in Pittsburgh. Before I sent it, I wanted to attach a couple of pictures I had taken of the group. But when I reached for the picture, I wasn’t there. Neither was the hard drive. Actually an array of four hard drives. 480 GB of data. Somewhat less, of course, since it wasn’t chock full, but it was close. And it was gone.

Since I hate to roll over easy for a computer, I fought the inevitable for awhile, reloading drivers, reconfiguring and rebooting, vacuuming the dust (something that always makes me feel better when t/s-ing). But all to no avail, except to raise my anxiety level.

Early in our marriage, we were robbed a couple of times. Once, they hit our house, when we lived in Rhode Island. It didn’t take too long for us to figure out that they took our VCR (this was when people cared about VCR’s) and all of the jewelry Vicki wasn’t wearing that day. But it would have been helpful if the robber had left a note: “Don’t bother looking for the following items, as I decided to take them from you today.” We didn’t see a note, so we looked.

Losing a hard drive is something like that. There’s no note, of course, outlining the files and data that have evaporated. So you have to scrounge around your mind to figure out what’s missing – permanently. Perhaps the biggest item on my memory list was the pictures I’ve taken with the Canon camera I bought last March. 15,000 pictures. And happily, I backed them up last week before leaving for the conference in PA. Some luck, that.

The music (80GB) was another story. Almost all of it was on the iPod, but getting files from an iPod to a hard drive is like trying to put tooth paste back into the tube. It can be accomplished, but it’s going to be messy. Yup – got the tee-shirt all afternoon.

The RAID array was primarily there for DV editing, and the final projects are all copied and archived elsewhere. But with all that space, a boatload of odds and ends weren’t backed up anywhere. Now they’re lost. Which gets me to wondering about our future – the future of data in a digital age.

Hard drives fail. Inevitably. Usually after a few years. The idea that we could retrieve the data from a hard drive 25 years down the road is laughable. 100 years? Unimaginable. So what will survive this relentless push toward obsolescence and decay? What music and pictures, what stories and documents? Because if we’re putting it on a hard drive, kiss it all good bye. Makes a clay tablet and stylus look cutting edge by comparison.

And don’t even think about preserving anything on a disc (CD or DVD). They’re lucky to last 5 or 10 years – or far shorter if they venture too far from the jewel case.

So that leaves us with a pretty short memory span, for all of the data we generate. Much of it (like this blog) deserves the oblivion to which it is surely headed after giving it’s author a much-needed rant.