Drat

I do a lot of writing - not professionally, by any means, but certainly a lot of amateur writing. I used to keep the documents on my hard drive and occasionally copy them to a thumb drive as a backup, but then I got into the bad habit of just keeping them on the thumb drive and not having any local copies. Sure as crabgrass, about a week ago my thumb drive got corrupted and I lost everything. Well, not everything. I had a second thumb drive with an emergency backup from June of 2008, so I was able to recover everything up to that date.

But I've lost everything between June 2008 and today. That's a roughly 18-month slice of my life, and that's kind of annoying. I wasn't diagnosed with cancer until December 2008, so I lost everything I ever wrote about cancer, chemotherapy and mortality, which maybe isn't that bad a deal; who needs to dwell on that?

But I am highly annoyed that I now have an 18-month gap in my model diary. One of my more peculiar habits is keeping track of my modeling hobby in an immense seventy-page (at last count) text file. It includes every model I've finished since 1998, things I've learned, ideas, speculations, reviews, whiny complaints, the works. It isn't a serious loss - it is just a text file about a hobby, after all. But it does torque me that managed to keep this file intact for over ten years, through several different computers, only to lose 18 months of it because of a failed Geek Squad thumb drive.

So what's the moral of the story? There are two. A) Don't be so anal-retentive as to maintain a 70-page text file about your hobby, or B) if you must be so anal-retentive, don't forget to back the stupid thing up somewhere.

Dang it. Just dang it.