Here’s a little story about a day I call D4, that fateful December Day of Death and Destruction.
Once upon a time, I had massive amounts of data. Tens of thousands of photos. Literally hundreds of days of music in iTunes. Hundreds of videos I’d edited. Media of every sort.
It was December 4, 2010, a Saturday. I remember it like it was yesterday…
I’m very paranoid and conscientious about backing up data, and always have been. So paranoid, in fact, that I had created a redundant double-tiered backup system capable of holding about 6TB in permanent storage. Anyways, that fateful Saturday I was backing up my computer to the first tier of my raid-array—two striped LaCie drives connected by Firewire 800 to my Mac. When that short backup was complete, I then backed up my backup to my second-tier striped raid array, but this one was connected by USB 2.0. No problem. But this backup was going to take quite a bit of time, as I’d just finished shooting and editing a series of 30 short videos for a social media company, and had only backed it up to the first-tier backup. So I had tons of media to save to my second tier permanent storage.
So I made some coffee while the backup chugged along. After about thirty minutes or so, something suddenly smelled kinda funny in my crib, like burning rubber. I looked around, nothing was on fire.
And then one of the hard drives suddenly began making a queasy and sickening clicking sound, and then completely shut the eff down like when R2D2 got shot by the Jawas. Then each of the four individual drives followed suit, spinning down one after the other. At least they hadn’t made that horrible clicking sound, but something was terribly wrong nonetheless. It was a vibe thing, I knew in my gut somehow that I had just witnessed incalculable disaster…
Well, once the drives spun down, of course my Mac was unable to recognize any of them. I immediately prevailed upon a couple of my homeboys who work in IT at a major bank to have a look, but they were unable to retrieve data from a Mac-formatted drive.
After a couple of days, it was finally sinking in: I had just lost everything. ALL of my data. I had lost my backup, and to add insult to injury, I’d even lost my backup of my backup. All at the same time. It was like a data-tornado had rolled through, or a data-earthquake. All of my photos from my whole life. All of my music (I am also a DJ). All of my project files, both for music projects and video projects. About 3TB of data, everything, gone…
But most germane to this blog, I lost my entire demo reel. My copy of every video I had ever worked on was completely destroyed, like it had never happened. (If you’re reading this blog, you probably know that for an editor, a demo reel is everything. It is your entire testament to your craft, and your only calling card. No reel, no work, no exceptions.)
So, remorseful and terrified, I found a dude up in Marin (who shall remain nameless) who specialized in data recovery. He had great Yelp reviews and seemed really cool on the phone, but he was incredibly expensive. He charged $200 per drive just to open them. Then, the cost of recovering your data depended on what the situation was with your hard drives, but it was priced per gigabyte and was also very expensive. And, while he didn’t guarantee that he could recover any data, he was very reassuring. He assured me that he was a badass, and that he almost never was unable to recover at least 60% of a crashed drive, especially since these drives were redundant copies.
Well, I gladly coughed up the $800 for the chance to get my data back. He told me he could call me in a couple of days. A week went by, no word. I was getting a little nervous, so I called him. That conversation went something like this.
“Dude, sorry I didn’t call yet. Your drives are fucked, bro.”
“What? What do you mean ‘fucked’?”
“Like, fucked-fucked… I’ve tried, bro, and I can’t get anything off these drives. They’re completely, completely destroyed inside. Looks like a monkey took a hammer to them, bro, seriously. Like, I could maybe get about 10% of the data off of one drive—I have no idea of which directories I could get—and that’d cost you like $2,500, bro. The rest of them, forget about it.”
Well, I needed a second opinion. So I had my bank IT homeboy crack one open, and he confirmed that that one at least was indeed monkey-hammered, completely scratched on every sector or the media. He agreed, that data was irretrievable for the most part. To this day I have no idea how such damage could have happened, as those drives never left this apartment their entire short lives. In any case, I had lost everything. $800 down the drain.
But the bigger loss, of course, was the data. I’ve never recovered. As far as my demo reel goes, I’ve had to completely start over since 2010 (with the exception of a few precious things I found on a stray drive in the back of my closet). This website is a reflection of that restart.
Almost four years later, I’m still discovering that things are gone. Just this evening, I was searching for an Ableton Live sample, but oh yeah. It must’ve been lost on that terrible December Day of Death and Destruction…
I would say the point of this blog post is backup your data. But, hell, I was backing up my data when I lost everything, so…
I suppose the point is detachment, in the yogic sense of the word. Detachment from all things, including your entire virtual life and all of its artifacts. Real life itself is the only thing that matters. It’s important to evaluate life by other meansthan the things we accumulate, and data and demo reels are no exception. All of this other stuff—including and especially data—while precious, is just stuff; and as long as we have our lives we can always rebuild.
That’s what I try to tell myself, anyway…