I’ve lost it.  All of it.  Well … most of it … and hopefully only temporarily.  Specifically what I lost was data – lots of it:  hundreds of digital photos, thousands of MP3s, countless documents, spreadsheets, graphic design projects, videos, etc.  All gone without so much as a hiccup of noise to announce their departure.  You see, they were all saved on an external USB hard drive – a 1Tb drive that I treated myself to last fall – that suddenly decided to cease to function.

The loss is inexplicable and immeasurable.  The drive had been working fine no more than a couple days ago.  But when my wife attempted to fire it up today to access it, it seemed disinclined to come to life.  The power light would come one and blink a bit.  Her laptop would attempt to connect to it.  But in the end, the drive didn’t seem to want to perform.  I, being the manly man of technology that I am, attempted to use my own laptop and a number of different USB cables to troubleshoot the issue, but to no avail.  It is kaput.

The good news:  (a) it seems the device is still under warranty and (b) there are services available who may be able to recover the lost data.  So hopefully at some point in the near future I will have a shiny new external hard drive that works and all of my files conveniently found and restored (unfortunately not without incurring some costs, but little in life comes for free).  And beyond that I hope that I can manage to get to a point where such a loss is less likely (e.g., having my files in more than one place to avoid such catastrophic results).  But in the meantime, I’m floating in the limbo of not knowing if, when, or at what cost I will have my data recovered (or whether one of the costs of recovery is a void to the warranty).  And such a lack of knowledge leaves me at a loss for comfort, security, or resolve.