It was just another Tuesday evening: I was typing silly things into iChat while pushing pixels in Illustrator when my laptop started making an awful ripping sound. My screen froze, the spinning beach ball of death appeared, and the guttural roar grew louder. I switched the power off and crossed my fingers.

No luck. I tried every newfangled restart, reboot, and safe mode in the book, only to face black screens, alarmist icons, and installation discs spitting across my desk. This morning at the repair center, the computer doctors shook their heads and couldn’t look me in the eye. “It’s a hard disk failure, no question.” When they tried to recover my data, my sickly hard drive started crashing their computers.

“But how did this happen? My computer is only six months old!”
“These things just happen sometimes.”

They do. And now I’ve lost hundreds of photographs from Istanbul to Miami, from Detroit to Stockholm. I’ve also lost a good chunk of my music library, techno mixes, and unfinished tracks. And gone are all of the notes, text files, screenshots, references, and to-do lists that keep me oriented throughout the day. It could have been worse. Fortunately, I backed up my book-in-progress a few weeks ago in a rare fit of responsibility, so I didn’t lose too much writing — but the prognosis for recovering the rest of my stuff is grim. My stuff: a bunch of imaginary images and sounds and words that I never bothered to back-up regularly.

Now I’m pulling shards from old jump drives, cellphones, and Flickr, hoping to reconstruct some of my work. Needless to say, this incident has me thinking hard about how I work as well as the monetary value of a photograph from Puerto Rico, of a mix from a recent show, of some dashed-off notes for an essay I’d been meaning to finish. Forgive the mawkish tone here, but please stop reading this and back-up all of your data now. As I write this, I’m setting up Dropbox.