14 years later, I found it again
within four minutes of deciding
I wanted a photo of it.
I'm a closet archivist: I keep and organize information. I used to brag that I could find any piece of paper handed to me anytime in the last thirty years. Yeah, that's a bit of hyperbole, but in 2010, when the State of Montana said they had money for me from a phone company class action settlement, I was able to prove my residence by presenting a 1984 USWest phone bill in my name.
I brought my data hoarding predilection to my life as a programmer. Back when I got my first floppy disk equipped computer (1983 Tandy 2000), I archived my writing on 5¼ inch and then 3½ inch disks. WordStar unleashed my writing abilities: I could revise as I typed without white-out or having to retype entire pages to fix one sentence.
"Fast" meant something
different in the 80s.
As the years passed, I dutifully transferred my archives to the technology of each new era. When hard drives became common, I used Fifth Generation Systems' FastBack to make backups. That software should have taught me a valuable lesson: do not trust proprietary backup software. I didn't learn. I lost a shitload of programs and data when I discovered that a FastBack floppy made on one machine is not necessarily readable on another machine.
In the 1990s, when writable CDs became a thing, I made "permanent" copies of my work. Norton Ghost backup software saved me by making backups that could span multiple CDs. By 1997, I migrated old writing archives off hard drives and onto CDs as permanent storage. I thought they would last forever.
The FastBack lesson did not stick.
In the 1990s, a writing agent from New York City contacted me after discovering my short stories on my personal Web site. He suggested I could tie those stories together into an amazing novel. He expounded that I could be the gay Edward Abbey, spinning the adventures of a queer biker eco-radical, programming for Wall Street Investment Banks while riding the highways of the American West. I scoffed at him, saying I had no time for the absurd fantasy of writing as a career. I had a great deal with my itinerant software contracting. I dismissed him and his entreaties. I declared that if I survive long enough, I would write only when I became too crippled to do anything else.
My writing archives went horribly wrong in the early 2000s. I got really mad at Microsoft's racketeering and banished all their products from my life. I migrated to Linux machines, taking my hard drive archives with me. Out of sight, out of mind, I forgot about the Norton Ghost backups.
By 2015, I figured the prose of my 20s and 30s was gone forever.
Live fast and leave an
immaculately organized
hard drive.
One of the priorities of this cancer era of my life right now is döstädning. I'm death-cleaning: sorting the detritus and clutter of my life and getting rid of it. I do not want to leave the monumental task of my post-mortem clean-up to my beloved husband, Paul, or anyone else.
Going through an old box, I found a stack of old backup CDs: all those Norton Ghost backups. I briefly wondered if I could reclaim my old writing. Research told me that Norton Ghost died in 2013 and even the then-current version could not read the archives of its earlier versions. I found I could buy an early version of Norton Ghost on eBay. Perhaps I could spin a virtual Windows 2000 machine.
That thread of thought collapsed when I saw the state of the CDs. Some of them had become nearly transparent. Others showed the fractal bit rot pattern creeping in from the edges. I knew it was hopeless.
a chance of
success.
I sorted through the disks, tossing them in the trash until I chanced upon one labeled "backups 2000.07.22 \\talus\backups\drumlin". It didn’t say “Ghost” like all the other disks. "talus" was the name of my work laptop in 2000. "drumlin" was the name of my personal Windows 2000 machine of the time. I flipped the disk over and saw no bit rot, but it was pretty badly scratched. I found an old portable Apple CD/DVD drive and plugged it into my MacOS machine. After a lot of clicking, it gave me a directory listing, confirming it wasn’t a Ghost disk.
Then, at the bottom of the page, I saw a folder named "WRITING" and I gasped.
I switched into the folder, but the drive was unable to give me a listing. I jumped around on the disk and found many of the folders were readable. I tried to image the disk to no avail: it would get to about 70% and then click-click-click followed by silence until the eventual timeout.
I switched to a Linux machine and tried the same thing, getting the same results. Infuriated that I had gotten so close to finding my old writing, I racked my brain thinking how I could recover the data. I posted my dilemma to a friend and he suggested I try "ddrescue". Never having heard of such a program, I looked it up, read about how to use it, and then installed it on the Linux workstation. I gave it the appropriate commands to make an ISO image of the CD. On the first pass it was only able to retrieve about 75% of the data, but it keeps employing many tricks, even reading backwards.
Here is an example of
my writing from the
late 1980s: The Protest
Some thirty hours later, it performed a miracle, restoring 99.35% of the original data. I mounted the image, navigated to "WRITING" and found two subdirectories: "FICTION" and "JOURNAL".
It was all there: the old WordStar files, various MS-Word files, even a few MS-Write files and hundreds of plain text files. There’s even a copy of my 1991 Master's Thesis and bunch of photos from the early 1980s (probably scanned in 2000). LibreOffice was (mostly) able to open them all.
For two days, I have been obsessively poring over these documents and photos, reveling in the memories. I have a new window into my thoughts, emotions, tragedies and triumphs from lost decades. Long-dead friends and lovers whisper in my ears from within my own words.
Now it's 2024 and I'm in treatment for cancer. I can neither travel by motorcycle nor ride a mountain bike. With my new drug side effect of vertigo, even walking has complications. Hell, I don't know how much longer I’ll live.
By my own declaration, wasn’t this supposed to be the time that I write that novel?