My file is lost, but I’ll recover
(Originally published September 2024)
I’m an optimist.
So a few weeks ago, when my laptop seized up, I felt inconvenienced but not panicked. These things happen.
I couldn’t blame Apple; I carry that laptop around the house like a toddler with a favorite stuffed animal. It’s on the counter when I’m making dinner; it’s close at hand when I’m blindly aiming coffee toward my face at daybreak; it may have slid off my lap a time or two.
It’s been through some things.
I knew whatever Apple did would involve wiping the hard drive, erasing any information that wasn’t backed up. But I wasn’t worried. As I said, I’m an optimist.
Plus, after suffering several devastating losses over the years, I’m prepared. In the early 2000s, for instance, I learned the hard way why you don’t rely on rewritable CD-ROMs to back up nine months’ worth of business data. Catastrophes like that teach you to be more careful next time.
So when the laptop failed last month, I had triple protection: iCloud, Dropbox, and an external hard drive. And when my baby came home, good as new, I was able to restore everything—almost—in minutes.
“Unlike the thousands of files that were triply backed up, this one wasn’t. ”
But there was this one file I couldn’t locate.
It was a book I’ve been writing. Yes, a book. Was it the Vermont murder mystery I’ve been working on for years? No, that’s moldering in all three backup spots, right where I abandoned it two years ago.
Was it a compilation of my columns? No. I can see the comedic appeal of a 20-year record of my dislike of hot (and cold) weather interspersed with clichéd husband jokes about Mark. But I’ve got something even more entertaining.
Last fall, I finally got serious about the one topic that has bestseller potential: flax. Flax fiber, that is; the stuff that makes linen cloth and that, until about 150 or 200 years ago, many people grew at home. No one does it anymore, and I wanted to find out why.
I’m learning fast.
I’m in the middle of my own labor-intensive flax-to-linen project, which I was documenting in that manuscript. I harvested a crop of flax in July and am now rotting and drying the plant stalks. After a few more steps, I will spin the inner fiber into linen thread and, and, if I’m lucky, have enough to weave into a dish towel. Woo-hoo!
The 100 or more hours I spend in the process will, I hope, give me a small taste of what people used to go through for linen bedding and undergarments—and possibly explain why they always look so grim in old portraits.
Upon hearing about my passion for flax, most people make the polite but baffled “OK, but why?” face you are making right now. Well, if you could read what I’ve written so far, you’d understand. When Ken Burns gets ahold of the movie rights, I’m going to be famous.
The book also explores the absurdity of my growing flax when linen is commercially available. Why, now that we have life so easy, do we manufacture hardships in the name of recreation? (If you’ve ever been camping, you’re as much a part of the problem as I am.)
I was still early in the first draft, but trust me, those 20,000 words were compelling flax reading. And I say “were” because the words are gone. For good.
Unlike the thousands of files that were triply backed up, this one wasn’t. I have spent hours searching, drilling down into folders, trying every possible keyword and file extension. I even used recovery software. After a few hours of sifting through my backups, it displayed a box that said, “Search complete. Lost files found: 0. Summary: You’re screwed.”
Apparently, despite a plethora of backup options, I never confirmed that I had saved the flax document to any of them. I can’t believe I could have been so careless. Then again, having known me for many years, I can’t rule it out.
Still, the world is clamoring for my flax story. So in a few weeks, when the grief has eased, I will start over.
In the meantime, however, I keep plugging in the external hard drive, visiting Dropbox, and checking iCloud, hoping that maybe, just maybe, the file is there in plain sight after all.
What can I say? I’m an optimist, not a realist.
