August challenge. Texture; In search of lost files

I’m sure that if Proust were alive today he would be working on a massive 7-volume blog entitled ‘in search of lost files’. I too am engaged on a similar a quest.

Peeking out from this textured portable hard drive case is a portable hard drive. It is not blue by chance (although blue is my favourite colour), but by design. I have another portable hard drive which happens to be red - with matching case.

When I started using a laptop I knew that I would have to get organised and disciplined with regard to backing up files. Apart from emails, I tend to use the laptop for processing photos (when away from home) and recording music. The Record button on virtually all recording devices is red so I reasoned that a hard drive of that colour would be appropriate for music. The blue one I reserved for storing photos.

As it happens, our recent trip to Cornwall was the first time I’ve had to blip whilst away from home. Photos were stored on the laptop (in a separate folder for each day) and dutifully backed up. The image selected for that day’s blip was uploaded as usual and everything appeared hunky-dory. The word ‘appeared’ is, of course, a hint that it was not.

All my other photographs including my blip images are processed and stored on my desk-top computer. Yesterday, I thought I should really copy over the photos from Cornwall into my desk-top machine. We have to make a slideshow for the potters we shared the gallery with. We've been home nearly a month and it's remiss of me not to do it sooner.

You can probably guess what’s coming - the photos folder on the laptop was empty. Zilch. Not a sausage. I plugged in the portable hard drive and checked that; again empty. I won’t bore you with the details of the swearing and handwringing that went on; or the number of times the hard drive was plugged in and out, as if reinserting ad nauseam would encourage the files to reappear.

I have lost all my photos from Cornwall; the only survivors are those that were uploaded to blip. In the grand scheme of things this is trivial - but I had carefully photographed the potters’ artworks and so the loss is as much theirs as mine.

Until I can find a 12-year old hacker who understands these things I am stuck. In the words of Toyah Wilcox, “it’s a mystery.”

Anniemay gets round these issues by keeping the original images on her SD card until they are 'safely uploaded' (her words) onto her hard drive, ready to be archived. I may have to resort to this; in the meantime I encourage you to backup and then backup again.