yeah, these problems happen to everyone

Gratton shares HIS OWN PROBLEMS WITH LOST COMPUTER FILES.

But I don’t think it’s so much “luck” that I can only think of a handful of such incidents in my life. It’s more that I’m one of those obsessive savers (and often even printers) of current versions. Gmail acted like a drug for those of us with this tendency, because we can now send several updated versions per day to a second Gmail account and still never have a realistic chance of using up all the memory in the account.

While writing the foregoing, I was wondering in the back of my mind: “are there perhaps even worse incidents than the lost 25 pages of translation that I am simply repressing at the moment?”

And the answer turns out to be “yes”. The lost translation pages incident occurred during the final days of 2003, and I’ve said that was only the first of many disturbing incidents from that computer; it was then 3.5 years old, and hence that has become my time limit on laptops no matter what; I retire them after 3.5. That’s how long they last anyway, it seems.

In any case… the final stage of breakdown of that computer came in early 2005. And now it’s flooding back to me… I lost several months’ worth of stuff. I’d backed up the absolutely most important material, but it was mostly outdated, and some stuff was lost forever (including, I believe, a couple of months’ worth of emails).

But these are really fairly trivial incidents, I think. Some people have probably endured terrible traumas with lost data, and I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if there were some suicides in the mix along the way.