I recently made an international move. In preparation for moving, I copied all of the important files from all of the computers and hard drives that I had onto a single hard drive to take with me in my carry-on backpack.
When I left, things got kind of chaotic as a neighbor showed up, and she didn’t realize we were moving, and, so, we were talking to her and answering her questions while also trying to hurry to load the car and get to the airport.
In the process, I placed my carry-on backpack near the driver’s door and went about loading suitcases in the back. When I then got into the car, I didn’t realize that the backpack was still on the ground, because I was waving to our neighbor who was now standing in front of the car.
As I started to back out of the driveway, I heard and felt what seemed to be something dragging under the car.
We had animals who would sleep under our car sometimes, like cats or monitor lizards, so I always backed out slowly to give them time to move. Therefore, I was certain that it wasn’t an animal. Plus, it sounded like the car was dragging some kind of vegetation or textured material.
Looking through the front window, I saw our neighbor with a concerned expression on her face looking toward the front tire.
I stopped the car and pulled forward. Then I got out and saw that I had partially backed over my backpack. I quickly opened the backpack to check, as my neighbor asked if everything was ok.
There was an iPad that seemed to be a bit bent, but other than that, things looked ok and by this point, we were seriously running late, so I just put the backpack in the car and drove to the airport.
After checking in, I looked more closely, and the iPad was indeed bent, but I was able to more or less bend it back into shape, and it still worked (good job, Apple!!). Other than that, everything seemed to be fine.
Then a day later, after arriving at our destination, I went to do some work. I pulled out the hard drive, plugged it in, and heard something that sounded like the following:
“Zzzzz. . . Zzzzz. . . Zzzzz. . . Crrrrk. . . Crrrk. . . Crrrk. . . Skiiiiiiiik. . .”
And then there was silence.
The hard drive was dead.
There were many times in the past when I would get stressed out before going on a trip because there were so many things I tried to get done before traveling so that all of my responsibilities at work and home would be covered while I was away, but then as soon as I got on the plane, I would relax, and think, “It doesn’t matter anymore. Things will work out.”
And indeed, things at work and home would always work out while I was away.
Driving over, and destroying, a hard drive that contains all of the files from your professional work for the past 30 years is kind of like that. . . only more intense.
You realize that all of the research you did, all of the courses you taught, all of the resources you collected. . . that none of that really matters.
Or, to put it another way, none of that can really matter anymore because you’ll have to do something different from now on. . . since YOU DROVE YOUR CAR OVER YOUR HARD DRIVE!!!!!
I have (or maybe had) plans for the future. I really want to focus more on creating historical content for the digital world (videos in particular), and that is something that will be much easier to accomplish if I have the materials that were on that hard drive.
So, at the moment, I’m waiting for a boat to arrive, a boat that has those computers and hard drives that I copied everything from. I’ve been waiting for almost five months, and it’s supposed to arrive soon.
Yes, I know that there are people who say that you should upload everything to the cloud. However, I am trying to eliminate subscriptions from my life, and I guess I just like to live dangerously. . .
Mind if I asked for a follow up? 🙂
The boat arrived, and life goes on. Thank you for asking!! 🙂
Wow, Professor… I’m glad things turned out alright!
You may find it amusing to learn that “the other Liam” had a somewhat similar experience at roughly the same time (though over a slightly longer time-frame). In my case, I didn’t run over a hard drive, though I might as well have done so. What happened was that my lap-top self-destructed (most likely from malware; I had been targeted by extortionists, and had told them to fuck off just prior). Unfortunately for me, all the files concerning the business I had been running since 2014 were on either that computer or the previous one, which had suffered a hard drive failure. I had not been able to get all the files transferred before the drive quit completely.
I thought I had everything backed up on a high capacity thumb drive bought for that purpose, but for whatever reason it did not work. That left only one option, which was to remove the hard drives from the two dead computers, then try to recover the data by attaching them to a third lap-top via a SATA-to-USB converter cable, in order to access the files directly. Unfortunately, that didn’t work either; the files showed up on one of the hard drives, but they were empty- all the documents inside were gone…
Fortunately, after several months of searching, I was eventually able to locate paper hard copies of the most important information, so, like you said, life goes on!
Oh My God!!! That is a story!!!
I’m glad things (kind of) worked out in the end, but that must have been incredibly stressful!!!!!