My laptop hard drive died this weekend.   It’s physically not spinning, so it was probably damaged when it was dropped, bumped, or smacked.

There were plenty of opportunities for its senseless murder.  Bennett watched several unsupervised episodes of Dora the Explorer on it, and frankly, the kid’s a bit shifty.  You’ve got to keep your eye on him, especially since one of his favorite games is “fun with gravity;”  he loves to throw and drop things just to see what happens.

My laptop was also frequently jostled during our trip home from Michigan.  We had a two-flight trip with a two-hour layover in Detroit.  I was maneuvering three kids (aged 1, 3, and 5), three backpacks, a stroller, and a wheeled carry-on all my myself. Often there were so many things hanging on the back of the stroller that it would topple over when Bennett got out of his seat.

Again, I’m blaming my one-year-old.  If you think that’s poor form, you don’t have young children. As long as I delete this post before he can read it, I’ll avoid long-term emotional scarring, and if I’m lucky, he’ll be illiterate for another four years.  Anyway, I’m kidding. Mostly.

Maybe it was just the hard drive’s time to go.

SJ tried to fix it, but no dice.  He took it to some hardware ninjas at work, but they confirmed his diagnosis:  my hard drive was dead, dead, dead.

The cruelest part of this tragedy is that SJ backed up my laptop earlier this year (I bought him a fancy new backup drive for Christmas.)  I hooked it up this morning, and sure enough, he’d backed up my PC in March.

Unfortunately, he backed up the wrong file. I have absolutely nothing created since 2005.  Everything I’ve written, created, downloaded, and saved since 2005 has vanished.

I don’t blame SJ.  He was trying to help me out, and he feels *really* bad.  I could have backed it up myself, but didn’t.  Believe me, I will next time.

Now I’m going through the Kubler-Ross grief stages for a playing card-sized piece of metal.

I’ve stopped crying now – sobbing, at least – and I’m taking stock.  A lot is lost: address lists, all my papers from grad school, pictures sent by friends, budgets, ideas for books to write, software, my archived emails.

The most important things are recoverable; I can download my blog posts, much of my email is available on the web, my resume and expense reports are attached to recently sent emails.  Our family photos are on another computer.

I’ll get over this soon enough.  It’s just a thing.  A thing that literally encapsulated my work for the past two and a half years, but still just a thing.   I’m going to send it away to see if someone can recover any of the data.  It’s a slim (and expensive!) hope, but it’s allowing me to extend the denial stage and soften the blow.

Anyway, there’s an obvious moral to this story.  Please don’t let my hard drive die in vain.  Back up your computer.  NOW!