When Your Digital Life Vanishes
The man had been slumped over his laptop for a week by the time his body was discovered. His deliquescent tissue had seeped under the keys, short-circuiting the motherboard. It was a killing from beyond the grave, flesh and blood’s revenge on silicon. Yet digital death differs, crucially, from the genuine article. Sometimes, with luck, it can be reversed.
It happens to the best of us—the farmer who plowed over his smartphone, the biologist with a flooded lab, the professional photographer whose dog chewed through his SD card just after an important shoot. Losing files is inevitable in our paperless, data-driven, device-mediated world, notwithstanding its fanciful promises of cloud-based immortality.
I used to count myself one of the prepared. Little escapes my archival dragnet: I keep every phone I’ve ever owned in a labelled shoebox, and the archived “souls” of long-defunct computers on a PC called Thoth, for the Egyptian god who records the weighing of hearts on the journey to the afterlife. Then, six years ago, I set my iPhone down on the edge of my bathroom sink, and it fell, shattering on the tiles.
The spiderwebbed screen bled colors, and the keypad flashed, as though ghostly fingers were trying to guess my passcode*.*{: .small} I winced at the expense, but the intangible costs emerged more slowly. I realized that the phone had stopped synching with my iCloud, and, when I brought it to a repair shop, they couldn’t fix it. Among the likely casualties were some of the last texts and voice mails I’d received from my father, who’d died of heart failure not long before.
It was from him that I’d learned to protect my files in the first place. Growing up, I practically lived in his home recording studio, a starship’s bridge of mixers and monitors where he set aside a corner for my experiments with code. A musician who’d played with Miles Davis, and written and produced for Madonna, he was also a data hoarder, and he had spent a decade digitizing his extensive record collection for a custom music server that he dubbed Soulbro.
My father taught me to burn disks, to back up files, and to discharge static electricity before handling a computer’s delicate innards. He had a surgically implanted defibrillator and liked to call himself a cyborg—a boast laced with irony, because the device periodically misfired, delivering shocks that could knock him to the ground. He spent his final weeks in an I.C.U., which appeared to me like a nightmare double of his studio, its monitors transcribing the rhythms of his own waning heart.
The studio took years to clear out. I made disk images of the half-dozen computers, which were subsequently dismantled. Then, this fall, my mother found two hard drives we’d overlooked, which could have been either mine or his. Both failed to register when I plugged them into my computer; one made an ominous grinding noise. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to let them go.
For thousands of data-loss victims, the last resort is a recovery service called DriveSavers. It’s a half hour from San Francisco over the Golden Gate Bridge, in the balmy, scenic suburb of Novato. The boxy, low-rise office overlooks a verdant wetland frequented by otters and egrets. Visiting in January, I felt that I’d arrived in hard-disk heaven.
I was greeted by Sarah Farrell and Mike Cobb, two directors of the company. Farrell, a teacherly woman with blond hair and a beekeeping hobby, oversees business development but used to be an engineer. “In the lab, I just assume everything has been in the toilet,” she told me. “During COVID, I can’t even tell you what people spilled on their MacBooks.” Cobb, who runs engineering, is a genial man with lively blue eyes, and once saved a computer tower from a burrowing squirrel: “He peed right on the power supply.” Cutesy anecdotes alternated with triumphs and tragedies—a school district rescued from a ransomware gang, an iPad salvaged from a plane crash. “They made me too sad,” Farrell said of the worst cases. “I had to be, like, ‘Symptoms, no story,’ or I’d never be able to go home.”
Their handiwork was on display in the lobby’s Museum of Bizarre Diskasters, an exhibition of silicon carnage. “I remember opening this one out on the deck,” Cobb said of an ancient Toshiba laptop, which had burned shut in a fire. “It was like an oyster.” One successfully recovered smartphone had been shredded by a snowblower. Another had been sliced in two by a monorail, like a magician’s assistant. The company regularly buys brand-new devices and tears them to pieces. “It’s like the jaws of life,” Cobb said. “If a car gets absolutely demolished, you need to know what to cut and what not to cut.”
DriveSavers receives some twenty thousand inquiries each month. It has saved data for government agencies, multinational corporations, and more than a few celebrities, whose autographed portraits beamed from the lobby walls. Sidney Poitier recovered a draft of his memoir through the company’s good offices; Khloé Kardashian, a phone that fell into a pool. Data loss has been the digital age’s great equalizer: What else could bring together such disparate figures as Willie Nelson, Buzz Aldrin, Gonzo the Muppet, and Gerald Ford?
The memorabilia dated back to the eighties. Back then, hard drives stored so little and cost so much that they were generally more valuable than the files they contained; one forty-megabyte drive on display in the lobby originally retailed for twenty thousand dollars. Advances in storage density, and the digitization of everything from filing taxes to laying out magazines, changed this calculus. “It was like two crossing lines,” Jay Hagan, who co-founded DriveSavers, later told me. “The cost of drives was going down, and the value of data was going up.”
Fittingly, the company emerged from the crash of a hard-drive manufacturer, Jasmine Technologies, where Hagan met his co-founder, Scott Gaidano. In 1989, they established DriveSavers as a repair service for their former employer’s abandoned customers, whom they quickly realized were more concerned about their files than their hardware. “I came up with this theorem,” Steve Burgess, a data- recovery pioneer who sold his own company to the duo, told me. “The value of a person’s data is negatively correlated with whether or not they have it. Once they have it, it really wasn’t worth anything. But, if they don’t have it, it’s worth an arm and a leg and their children.”
Recovering data from an iPhone or a hard drive can set you back three thousand dollars, and from an enterprise server, six figures. Although DriveSavers has a “no data, no charge” policy for most customers, it gets accused of overcharging by scrappier competitors, who tend to attribute the company’s success to attention-grabbing stunts. (One rival has mocked DriveSavers’ engineers as “clowns in spacesuits,” alluding to the protective gear they wear in ads.) But Farrell insists that the fees reflect care and determination. She once spent a week recovering an iPad for a couple with an autistic child who was so attached to a farming simulator that he couldn’t calm down without it. “They still invite me to barbecues,” she said. There have also been litigants who’ve lost their evidence; scientists, their research; the bereaved, their dearly departed’s final words.
DriveSavers’ own death has been foretold many times. The cloud was supposed to destroy them; before that, it was commercial backup services, solid-state drives (SSDs), and encrypted smartphone hardware. Still, people keep finding ways to imperil their files, which grow ever more numerous and irreplaceable. Our precarious datasphere extends from cryptocurrency to telemedicine; now, with the advent of virtual companions, it’s even possible to lose the love of your life to a glitch.
Technological progress may be increasing our exposure. A.I. agents are becoming notorious for accidental deletions, while the proliferation of data centers has wildly inflated the cost of storage. And, despite exponential growth in capacity, the average hard drive’s life span remains just under seven years. Considering the hundreds of zettabytes of data estimated to exist in the world, it’s as though a million Libraries of Alexandria were saved from annihilation solely by hamsters on wheels.
Perhaps this is why I found it so soothing to be among the Diskasters, whose data, after all, had survived. I’d sent my phone ahead of me, and the tour had kindled a cautious optimism about its fate. One vitrine contained a decapitated Mac PowerBook 100, which had spent three days underwater; next to it, for emphasis, a taxidermied piranha bared its teeth. All these devices had escaped the maw of oblivion. Why should mine be any different?
The PowerBook had belonged to a couple of jugglers, Tony Duncan and Jaki Reis, who nearly lost it on a cruise down the Amazon in March, 1993. They were performers on the Ocean Princess, where they juggled swords and torches after dinner. One afternoon, they were practicing as the Princess left Belém, in northeastern Brazil, and promptly hit a sunken wreck. They helped the crew evacuate the ship and were safe in a hotel by nightfall. But they neglected to retrieve their PowerBook, which held their contacts, promotional materials, and financial records. “Everything was on that computer,” Reis told me. “I couldn’t leave it behind.”
Reis talked her way onto a crew member’s unofficial salvage expedition. Back on the Princess, whose lower decks had sunk below the waterline, she waded down a corridor with a flashlight in her mouth, trying not to think about piranhas. She found the laptop fully submerged and assumed that it couldn’t be resuscitated but brought it back with her anyway. “I’m an Apple person,” she explained. Four repair services turned down the case. Then Duncan saw an ad for DriveSavers: “They were, like, ‘Doesn’t seem likely, but what the hell?’ ” Miraculously, they succeeded, and began exhibiting the PowerBook in an aquarium at the annual Macworld trade show. “We should have negotiated for dividends,” Duncan said.
Many such resurrections take place in DriveSavers’ “clean room,” an E.R.-like space equipped with fans and HEPA filters which reminded me of where the Oompa Loompas operate Wonkavision. Before entering, I walked across an adhesive mat that tore the dust from my soles, then donned a mask, gloves, and white coveralls. The room had about eighty computers, which, because of the controlled environment, could safely run in their birthday suits, their bare motherboards mounted to the walls. Monitors showed digits scrolling in columns as repaired hard-disk drives (HDDs) were imaged; others waited in red and blue bins. Phil Reynolds, an engineer, showed me to a table where a four-terabyte drive lay open. “You got a firm grip?” he asked.
It was about the size of a paperback novel, with smooth, reflective disks nestled inside. HDDs store data on swiftly spinning “platters,” usually made of glass or aluminum. Embedded within them are microscopic grains of a magnetic alloy, whose polarities are flipped by “read-write heads” that float just nanometres from the surface. Every year, the grains get smaller, and the means of zapping them more sophisticated; in March, Seagate, one of the leading hard-drive manufacturers, announced a forty-four terabyte drive, its largest ever—a milestone made possible by a technology called heat-assisted magnetic recording, which uses a laser to heat each grain for a nanosecond.
Reynolds turned a flashlight on the platters, which reflected our masked faces. A single drive might have two, five, or even ten spinning in parallel, with a stack of heads flitting between them. Because of the speed of revolution, a single grain of dust can be enough to strip the magnetic film and obliterate the underlying data. Another threat is corrosion, usually from immersion in liquid: Reis and Duncan’s hard-drive platters were cleansed with a deionized solution, then swapped into a replacement drive. “All kinds of catastrophic things can happen,” Reynolds said.
My apprenticeship began with a simple disassembly, a typical exercise for new employees. After a brief demonstration, Reynolds handed me pliers and a tiny screwdriver; I struggled to remove one of the actuator magnets, which held so firmly to its opposite that I feared smashing it into the platters. Similarly tricky was the printed circuit board, or PCB, which precisely choreographs the drive’s machinery. Each is particular to its model, Reynolds explained: “Without this chip, you’re not ever going to get that drive to work again.”
Sourcing parts is half the battle. Outside the clean room, I spoke with Pamela Rainger, who manages DriveSavers’ inventory. “These are our donor bodies,” she said with a sweeping gesture. “They’ve all been tested and are ready to give up their lives.” Behind her, more than thirty thousand drives were shelved in antistatic bags on metal racks. It’s not always enough to simply buy a replacement; because of a complex supply chain and the relentless pace of innovation, the donor drive should, ideally, have been made in the same factory, even in the same week, as the recipient. DriveSavers retains a personal shopper in Shenzhen to track down elusive models. For obsolete equipment, they turn to eBay and specialized venders; once, Rainger had to find a match for a forty-year-old drive from an embroidery factory, which had operated a robotic arm. The trickiest category might be novelty items, such as the SpongeBob disposable camera one family had used to document a vacation. “There are actually several SpongeBob disposable cameras,” she said. “I had to find the exact same one.”
Smart devices add yet another layer of complexity. Downstairs from the clean room, I visited the Flash Physical Department, where a handful of engineers hunched over soldering irons, microscopes, and assorted diagnostic tools. I was greeted by Matt Burger, the head of the department, a friendly, bearish young man with glasses and a mop of brown hair, who was putting a thumb drive through an X-ray machine. “Somebody had it in their laptop and dropped it on its side,” he explained. The monitor showed a slightly bent rectangle covered with dots and lines, which didn’t look so bad to me. I listened for a prognosis, hoping that it might have some relevance to my own wounded machines. Then he spotted a faint crack through the tiny region of the drive that held the memory chip. “This is going to be a no-recovery,” he said.
Flash memory is used in thumb drives, smartphones, newer laptops, and SSDs. The technology exploits a phenomenon known as “quantum tunnelling” to trap electrons in floating-gate transistors, like the genies imprisoned by King Solomon. Because they have no moving parts, flash chips are generally considered to be more stable than HDDs. But their design can also complicate data recovery. Many devices integrate flash storage into their main logic boards and cryptographically pair it with other components for security, a practice popularized by Apple. Saving them can involve transplanting not one but several chips. Burger explained, “You have to have it all working as one cohesive thing. No funny business.” The dead man’s laptop, which arrived still soaked in bodily fluids, had required engineers to remove and clean nearly every chip on the logic board before it could be resurrected, much as Egyptian embalmers preserved the stomach, the liver, the lungs, and other organs so that the deceased could function in the afterlife.
The arcane art that makes all this possible is called “microsoldering”—essentially, soldering under a microscope. Burger sat me down for a tutorial at an empty workstation, where a damaged iPhone board had been readied for my inexpert hands. It was an L-shaped thing about the size of my thumb and forefinger; in one of its corners, a chip no bigger than a peppercorn had slightly cracked. “See how it’s impacted there?” Burger asked as I adjusted the microscope. “You can see the actual glass through the top coating.” Burger gave me tweezers and heat-resistant gloves; though my hands felt steady, under the microscope they shook like mad. I was like a giant medical student with a tremor, about to perform surgery on a Who out of Dr. Seuss.
Burger tasked me with swapping out the chip. First, I used a syringe to apply flux, an antioxidant that helps solder stick. Next, I heated the chip with a hot-air gun until the tiny grid of metal balls connecting it to the board melted. “Get your tweezers in there,” Burger encouraged; at last, it came loose. Putting in the new chip was more difficult. I initially struggled to stencil new solder balls onto its underside—“He’s going to break it,” Farrell warned—but managed to finish the procedure, though I inadvertently fused a few resistors in the process. “Have I been fired at this point?” I asked. “Everybody practices,” Burger diplomatically replied. “You could maybe even still salvage data.”
The final stage of a recovery takes place in the Logical Department, a warren of computer towers where engineers analyze the recovered disk images. One of them, Will DeLisi, looked startled as he turned away from a screenful of digits: “They said ‘perfect copy,’ but it’s gibberish, plain and simple.” When files have been deleted, corrupted, or overwritten, it’s his job to reconstruct them; today, he was searching for pictures that had mysteriously vanished. “This file ends mid-sector,” he said, adding that cheap thumb-drive firmware was probably to blame. “The controllers just spit up on top of the file system.”
Files can disappear in any number of ways, only some of which are irreversible. On many systems, deleting them merely removes their addresses from a registry, freeing the space to be overwritten. (This is one reason that the F.B.I. was able to recover deleted e-mails from Hillary Clinton’s private server.) Similarly, corruption or physical damage might destroy a file’s header, which contains its identifying metadata, while leaving other parts of it untouched. In other words, there are file traces everywhere, like so many ghosts in a vast bardo, which can sometimes be brought back to life.
Logical data recovery is the most D.I.Y.-friendly kind. A YouTuber called Babylonian, who goes to extreme lengths to solve “trivial mysteries,” got nearly seven million views for a video of him “rescuing” a fan’s cherished Pokémon, tragically scrambled in a Game Boy save-cheating attempt fifteen years earlier. (The fan, now an adult, gets emotional when the Pokémon, a Blastoise, is finally retrieved.) But at larger scales it becomes dizzyingly complex. This is especially true when it comes to ransomware, a form of digital extortion that involves encrypting files and threatening to destroy or publish them.
Ransomware recoveries are DriveSavers’ biggest growth area. The day I visited, engineers were racing to unscramble sixty HDDs belonging to a health-care nonprofit. Time was of the essence, but the attackers, too, had been up against the clock. Ransomware attackers usually have limited time before they’re detected. The slowness of encryption forces them to triage. For instance, they might use scatter algorithms that encrypt every _n_th megabyte, or delete backups without “zeroing out”—overwriting with zeroes—the underlying files. All this gives recovery specialists an opening. They can write case-specific code to piece together files from partially destroyed backups, or even infer missing data by identifying patterns of encryption. Ideally, the data can be retrieved without a ransom payment, which, in the case of large organizations, might run into the millions.
The phenomenon has exploded in recent years, with small businesses and municipalities particularly at risk. (Last July, St. Paul, Minnesota, suffered an attack that required the deployment of a National Guard cybersecurity team.) A franchise model allows enterprising hackers to license malware from syndicates. “Literally anyone can sign on as an affiliate through the dark web,” Andy Maus, who oversees DriveSavers’ ransomware recoveries, explained. A.I. has exacerbated the situation, he went on: “You can take an I.T. professional who’s relatively unsophisticated, and suddenly, they can mount a sophisticated attack.” In 2023, the company worked on fewer than fifty ransomware recoveries; last year, the total was nearly three hundred.
Occasionally, even victims who pay their ransoms need data recovery, when the decryptors they “buy” malfunction. Their attackers, anxious to maintain their credibility, sometimes even join them in searching for a fix: “I’ve heard they have excellent customer service,” Farrell said. It’s one of many reasons that DriveSavers’ C.E.O., Alex Hagan—who took over from Jay, his father, in 2023—believes that his industry isn’t going anywhere. “Technology will continue to improve, but as long as humans are involved, there’s room for error,” he told me. “People continue to break stuff.”
The more we entrust to computers, the more they become mirrors of our vulnerability. Each month, DriveSavers receives calls from people facing the loss of their memories, their livelihoods, their businesses, their cryptocurrency wallets. For two decades, the most desperate were fielded by Kelly Chessen, the company’s first “data crisis counselor,” who came to the job from a suicide-prevention hotline. “By the time folks got to us, they’d usually been through several levels of computer work,” she recalled. “There was that element of ‘You’re my last chance!’ ” She talked down I.T. guys sobbing about fumbled company servers and entrepreneurs screaming from the wreckage of their burned-down stores; one woman called because her boss had shot his computer, though, luckily, he’d missed the hard drive. When recoveries failed, Chessen helped callers process their emotions—and often bore the brunt of them: “I can’t tell you how many times I got the whole ‘Well, they got Hillary’s e-mails back!’ ” Because there are no limits on call time, the transition from customer service to therapy was often imperceptible. “I’d tell them, ‘This is a grieving process,’ and you could hear them go, ‘Huh,’ ” she said. “That’s not something they’re used to hearing from a tech company.”
Rarely is data loss more of an occasion for grief than in the aftermath of disasters. The National Transportation Safety Board investigates accidents across the United States. Every year, its vehicle-recorder division processes more than five hundred pieces of evidence from wrecked trains, cars, ships, and planes—not only black boxes but also personal devices. In 2013, photos and a takeoff video from deceased passengers’ phones helped establish that a small plane in Soldotna, Alaska, had crashed because of improperly balanced baggage. Two years later, it salvaged a voyage-data recorder from the wreck of the S.S. El Faro, a cargo ship that sailed into a hurricane and sank with all hands aboard. “These are sometimes the last records, the last words, the last moments of someone’s life,” Ben Hsu, who leads the division, told me. “But our work is technical. The job is to help determine what happened and prevent it from happening again.” Sometimes data extracted from personal devices is shared with victims’ loved ones, offering an opportunity for closure that is all the more significant in the absence of physical remains.
Last year, Jeff Wong had just returned from scattering his father’s ashes in Hawaii when a glow appeared over the mountains near his home in Altadena. He and his family evacuated—and, the next morning, awoke to the news that their home had been consumed by the Eaton Fire. A fire safe in his office seemed to be intact, though; a few weeks later, he enlisted safecrackers to open it. Nearly everything inside had turned to powder, including a dozen storage drives with digitized family photos. But two inner, portable safes had survived, though the drives they contained had partially melted. “You could see the components with plastic fused into them,” he told me. “But they were still shaped like drives, so I had some hope.” After five months, DriveSavers recovered the contents of two of them, with artifacts of the damage still visible in certain images. Missing, however, were most photos of his father’s sojourns across the Pacific after emigrating from China in the nineteen-forties: “They must have been on another drive.”
Whether or not people get their files back, they tend to emerge from the experience of data loss at least slightly changed. Kevin Bewersdorf left New York City for the Catskills in 2016. A filmmaker and visual artist, he yearned for a more grounded life, which he found in the rural town of New Kingston. He embarked on a new career as a full-time contractor and handyman, jobs whose patient intimacy fostered a deep love of the place and its people. “Every day, some little beautiful thing will happen on the job sites—the way the light is shining or a person who stops by,” he said. He made a daily practice of filming such moments, which he saved to an external drive. As years passed, he realized that a film was taking shape.
In November, 2023, Bewersdorf was transferring footage in his blue easy chair when inspiration struck. He reached for a nearby notebook, but his arm caught the cable linking his MacBook to the drive, which crashed to the ground. When he plugged it back in, the drive didn’t even register. He tried to stay calm.
“I pride myself on shunning preciousness,” Bewersdorf told me. “ ‘Oh, my movie, I was gonna make this cool movie’—who cares? There’s a lot going on in the world.” After trying a few home remedies from Google and Reddit, he resolved to move on. Yet sadness gnawed at him, especially after an elderly neighbor he’d often filmed passed away. A friend recommended DriveSavers, and after agonizing over the price tag he sent the drive in. The files were back by Christmas, and last summer “New Kingston” premièred at the Rockaway Film Festival.
“I had more reverence for what I was doing, which is part of the value of death,” Bewersdorf told me. “It’s funny, these ‘files’—what are they, even? Electrons vibrating in some container. But if they can die, if we can lose them in the way that we can lose the information that makes up a person, then they live.” It’s a truth reflected by the very language we use to describe digital storage, he went on: “They say you ‘save’ a file, like it’s going to Heaven—the idea of salvation is woven into it. I don’t know what digital Hell would be. I’m just saying that digital Heaven is where all the files are.”
Yet salvation is never guaranteed. In the summer of 1995, Peter Sacks, then a professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, was nearly done with a book he’d been writing for the past seven years. He always drafted in longhand but had recently embraced digital revision, typing out his manuscript on a Kaypro word processor while staying with a friend on Martha’s Vineyard. When the time came to return to Baltimore, he didn’t know what to do with his boxes of handwritten materials. Too polite to impose them on his host, he took them to the landfill, then set out for Logan International Airport.
“There was a sense of unburdening,” he told me at his studio. “But I also didn’t realize the fragility of the medium I was trusting.” The book was on two floppy disks, which he put in a tray at the security checkpoint; upon his arrival in Baltimore, he slotted them into the Kaypro and found that they could no longer be read. There might still have been a chance to save the data were it not for a technical misstep. “You had an option to reformat,” he explained. “I erased the whole thing.”
Sacks enlisted a friend to search the landfill, and he made a series of calls to the university’s I.T. department. But the trash had been turned over, and the specialists said that nothing could be done. The book’s loss seemed to him strangely foretold by its subject: the emergence of modernism in art and literature against the backdrop of mechanization, and the fragmentation of nineteenth-century notions of the poetic “I.” Now it was Sacks himself whose subjectivity had been shattered. “It was a sense of falling and never really hitting bottom,” he recalled. “In some ways, I still haven’t.”
He fell into a depression and largely stopped writing; although he continued composing poetry and occasional essays, he would never again publish a book-length work of prose. During a residency in Marfa, Texas, he entered a period of “mute wordlessness,” taking landscape photos and covering them with lines of Wite-Out. “I was working through the grief of having something disappear,” he said. “But that erasure was also opening up a new space that hadn’t existed, and that became the field into which I moved.”
Sacks is now a highly regarded artist. The walls of his studio were covered with his vibrant, densely collaged paintings. A triptych called “Paradiso” showed a white expanse traversed by ribbons of color, so layered with pigment, textiles, scraps of verse, and found objects that it was almost barnacled. “I’m trying to make something ‘digital’ in the sense of your fingers,” he said, inviting me to touch the work. “The materials are things that seem to have been worn, torn, burned, and have a duration.” And the paintings began, in part, as a meditation on erasure—a rebuke, of sorts, to a digital regime that had abandoned writing’s tactility.
If he still had the erased floppies, he’d probably incorporate them into a work as a memento mori, he told me. I asked whether he’d even want the book recovered, were such a thing possible. “Bring Eurydice back for real?” he replied. “Absolutely. I’m at peace with it, but not that much.”
Before I left DriveSavers, my iPhone was brought out in a little red bin, like a patient on a gurney, or a body in a drawer at a morgue. It was pronounced unrecoverable. The engineers had managed to revive it, but it wouldn’t accept the passcode I’d given them, though I felt certain I’d remembered it correctly. Nevertheless, I declined to use the company’s solid-state shredder, which extrudes a kind of silicon confetti; to me, its gears were the crocodile jaws of the Egyptian goddess Ammit, who eats the hearts of the damned.
A few weeks later, DriveSavers called about those two hard drives I’d found, which I’d also sent them. One had suffered a fatal head crash, but the other merely had a failed control board and had soon been spun up again. The company sent me a flash drive with its data, and I plugged it in with nervous anticipation—might it contain some unfinished work of my father’s? Perhaps I’d find the jazz opera he’d wanted to write about Frederick Bruce Thomas, a Black émigré from rural Mississippi who’d opened a legendary night club in tsarist Moscow.
Alas, the recovered hard drive was mine. I found instant-messenger logs from high school, alternately mortifying and endearing, and various coding projects, including my browser-based version of the ancient Egyptian board game Senet. (Some things never change.) But there were only taunting flashes of the stories and journal entries I remembered writing; in what felt like a prank played by the ghost of my adolescence, I couldn’t guess the password to a locked file saved as “Thoughts.doc.”
Had everything else been on the other drive? Or had I simply imagined all these precious virtual talismans, my father’s and my own? The cascade of disappointments caused me to doubt my own recollections, as though my brain were only a bad pressing of some lost digital master. It also brought back the memory of my first data-loss experience.
I was fourteen when my computer crashed in a botched upgrade. The games I’d been coding were gone, as was the scenery I’d designed for Microsoft Flight Simulator. I was inconsolable. My father, though already in pajamas, put on his blue bathrobe and hastened to the studio to operate. He disassembled the machine, which he’d also built, while I hovered nearby.
The recovery operation stretched into the wee hours. He swapped the drive into another computer, which he used to analyze the corruption. Ultimately, he concluded that the files had been overwritten by Windows Vista—an operating system so buggy that it was nicknamed the Visaster. He broke the news with a sad smile and a line from “The Lion King,” delivered by Scar: “Life’s not fair.”
He told me a story about his own father, who’d left when he was young. They were more or less estranged but met occasionally to pretend otherwise. Once, my grandfather announced that he’d found a roll of film with the only extant footage of my father’s childhood. He invited him over to screen it, hoping, perhaps, to mend through nostalgia a relationship that had never been whole. But the tape had aged so badly that it disintegrated in the projector, along with their illusory reconciliation.
At the time, I was horrified. A child of the early nineties, whose first, second, and third everythings had been meticulously committed to camcorder, I could hardly imagine such a bonfire of beginnings or see that the story was an heirloom infinitely more valuable than the footage it concerned. Now I knew otherwise. It would have been nice to have the voice mails, the diaries, the unfinished music. But some records are most revealing when they’re zeroed out. ♦