So.

Some of you, mainly over on Discord, might've been wondering why I kept a near-total comms blackout over the last two weeks.

I'll keep this brief: it started mainly back in September, when we had some house painters over. They're the best in the county, or so I've been told, but they were really aggravating at first. Their power tools somehow penetrated my headphones even with loud music, and after they sanded off the old paint from the window frames, I went to bed with a pounding headache. The vibrations made the windowpanes squeal, and they even cracked a few of them. (They did at least replace those.)

The job took three weeks, but the noisy part at least took only three days. They sprayed the paint on, did some minor detailing, and called it good. They even went so far as to replace some rotten wood railing on the patio and wire up some new light fixtures. We even have a new mailbox.

For three days of noise? I'd call it square.

Then we got fed up with our cell service provider. We wanted to switch, due to unreliable service, but keep our numbers at the same time, but AT&T really kept hemming and hawing and dragging their heels in the hope of keeping us as customers. This went on for months, and we just got fed up and went scorched-earth. Hopefully Consumer Cellular will be better.

It was also then that I finally got my very first smartphone. 2FA, here I come!

But by far for me the biggest blow to me during this whole fiasco, and this is going to be the main topic of discussion, happened on 5 October. My computer froze up, so naturally my first instinct was to reboot it, which is what I did. It hasn't failed before, so I saw no reason why it should now.

. . . except it did. Not only did it not boot, it couldn't even find the boot drive. All I heard were four clicks of the actuator arms inside the drive failing to engage, then BIOS throwing up an error amounting to "Where's my OS, boy?"

Naturally, I panicked, having never seen this kind of error before, and called up a local PC repair shop in town. The next day, I got the diagnosis: that drive was dead, and took about seven or eight years of data with it. All they could do was put in a new SSD and hand me a pamphlet for a data recovery service: DriveSavers.

Now, these guys are good. They pioneered the data recovery industry, and are typically the first to recover data from a new medium. From ancient SCSI drives to the latest Apple Silicon Macs, they've seen them all. They can pull data from drives that have been burnt from arson, drenched in Category-5 hurricanes, buried in mudslides, drowned in salt water, battered by soon-to-be-ex-wives, what have you. They've done recoveries for banks, hospitals, Hollywood studios, even the FBI. Granted, they don't come cheap, but pay the piper and they will move Heaven and Earth to get your stuff back. (Thankfully the pamphlet came with a 10% discount code.)

They're also no substitute for proper regular backups, which I was foolish enough not to do. They may have a 96% success rate, but 96% isn't quite 100%.

So even with those caveats, I felt somewhat confident that they could pull my stuff back. After all, if it was just the actuator arms, and the platters hadn't been scratched, then they might even be able to reïmage it outright. So after carefully following their packing instructions, and waiting the full three-day weekend because of course it was Columbus Day, I dropped my poor drive off at a FedEx place on Tuesday the 11th.

They gave me an overnight label, so it arrived the next day. I got a phone call on Thursday, and I was honestly shocked at their engineers' assessment of the condition. They popped it open in their cleanroom, and apparently it was a whole lot more than just the actuator arms. I didn't catch the details on what else went wrong, but from the sound of it, it was a total mess.

But by some amazing miracle, the platters were somehow unharmed, even after being through FedEx's hands. I authorized the recovery job right then and there, and prayed that they could get my stuff back. Yes, their estimate ran over $3500, and that's with the 10% discount applied on their economy option, but some things you simply can't put a price tag on.

Now, just to be clear, I am not a man of faith. I don't normally appeal to a higher being, because I never see the point. But perhaps prayer is a deeper instinct than I had thought, because I really hoped DriveSavers would live up to their name.

While the engineers rolled up their sleeves (not literally, it's a cleanroom after all) and got to work, I decided to kill the time by reading. I had already started reading Fallout: Equestria -- Project Horizons, and I was also keeping up-to-date on Rainbow Dash Around the World, Don't Bug Me, and Diplomatic Solution (yes Starscibe, I see you over there). And to fill the time between classes, I also read these from my backlog:

• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

• A few Wimpy Kid books:

  • Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Big Shot
  • Diary o a Wimpy Wean (the first book translated into Scots)
  • Diary of an Awesome Friendly Kid (Rowley Jefferson's perspective)
• American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
• Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

And I was about to get started on Babel-17's sister novella Empire Star when I got a call from DriveSavers just today. They had news for me, but it was not what I wanted to hear at all.

Their engineers failed. Apparently the damage was bad enough to corrupt the data.

My last hope, my final shot at recovering seven to eight years of my digital life, utterly vanished before my eyes. That drive, and all of its data, sang her song and became nothing.

All the memes I've saved over the years? Gone. The photos and videos I've taken? Gone. My music library? Gone. Various typefaces I've collected over the years? Gone. A large chunk of my YouTube archive? Gone. My browsing data going back to 2015, including bookmarks, tab sessions, userscripts, and unreads? Gone. My Steam mods? Gone. Hell, all my programs and their associated data? Gone. My homework folder? Gone. My "homework" folder? Gone. (And there was a surprising amount that has since been nuked from the Internet, which only made it that much more devastating.) My high school Google account, which I've kept around since 2016 for sentimental reasons? Gone. All the bills I've drafted for my proofreading job, including this month's? Gone. All the Scrivener project files I've ever made, including those for Hassenfeld Pony Anthology, When Stars Come Out to Play, Fallen-Song, The Children of Planet Earth, and even for unreleased stories? Gone. An original short story I wrote in February of this year, edited over the intervening months with Admiral Biscuit, and was right about to submit for publication? Fucking GONE.

You'll have to excuse me if I seem melodramatic, but knowing what was on that drive and realizing that it has been lost with no way to get it back is unironically devastating. I actually haven't felt this bad since my childhood cat was euthanized ten years ago. I need some time to grieve, and recover. And something tells me I won't have the time even to do that. (Strangely enough, while I was typing this, Mozart's Requiem came on the radio.)

I wish I could say I had better news about this, but I don't. They have a 96% success rate, and now I'm part of the 4%.

Now, before you try offering any sympathy, or help, know this: again, I never made regular backups, and DriveSavers was my last hope. Even if I ponied up ten times their estimate, if their engineers declare a drive unsavable, then that's just it. I have no recourse. Thank you for your generosity and kindness, but really I don't need or frankly deserve any of it.

I do have at least two things going for me, besides the aforementioned (newly-painted house, first smartphone). First, DriveSavers has a "no data, no charge" policy, so I'm down nothing. Second, note that I said I didn't make regular backups. The drive that died was a replacement, because I started running out of room. I still have the original, and it's more or less a snapshot from circa March 2018. Granted, that's still over four years of stuff lost, but at least it's something considering the PC itself was manufactured in May 2014.

And after doublechecking over a SATA-to-USB cable, it turned out a lot of the, ahem, smut that was lost, particularly some stuff that had since been deleted from the Internet, was on there as well. Strangely, in that entire mess, that was the one thing I was most worried about.

There's also a good chunk of my college work (including my favorite essay, which was my final assignment for my linguistic anthropology class), my high school Google account takeout, ~90% of my music library, a few unreleased fanfics (currently debating on whether I should release them, and how if so), browser data including bookmarks and such up to that time, and a few other odds and ends.

But everything after that? Poof. Vanished into the Big Zero.

So now I'll just be here, trying my damnedest to regain all that I have lost. It won't be easy, it'll take me a long, long time, and I sure as shit won't ever succeed completely, but I have to take this in stride. I'll start reïnstalling programs as I remember them, catch up on stuff I had meant to do before the shit hit the fan, exchange some uneasy greetings with my friends and colleagues over Discord---speaking of, if you've followed that link I've posted in that channel or PM, especially if you're one of the nineteen pings? I'm sorry. I say this sincerely: I am truly sorry for leaving you all in the dark. I realize you might've been worried about me, worried that I might've fallen sick, or hit by a car, or gutted in a mugging, or something actually terrible, but the truth is. . . my hard drive just kicked the bucket. And it was completely irresponsible of me not to keep you up-to-date on my situation---just as it was irresponsible of me not to keep regular data backups to begin with.

But there is an unexpected upside to the loss, as odd as this might sound. "All ends are beginnings," the Exo Stranger mentioned to the player-character in Destiny. Naturally, in the context of the game, her words were just a callback to the first cutscene: ". . . and that was the end of everything. But it was also a beginning." Now, looking back, I realize just how right she was. Yes, I may have lost a lot of stuff from recent years, but with that empty space I can do something else---something new. I can create new memories. I can clip video gameplay, laughing in victory or at a funny moment. I can spend time with friends both old and new online, sharing ideas, feelings, and dank memes (of course) back and forth. I can write new stories---not just fanfics, original stories that I can sell and make income off of.

And I can be damned sure to back it all up this time.

Good night, and good luck.