Argh Argh Argh Oh Whoo

I suddenly remembered what else was on the lost filesystem on Kodachi, my old Linux box: my collection of 50,000 photos. Gone! Gone! I've been using them for years for any web project that needed a small picture; I've used them to create avatars for my web forums; I had selected some of them for the overhaul of this blog before that project got eaten by the ever-hungry mice.

Gone! But wait... They originally came as part of Corel Gallery 1.3 million, a package long since forgotten, but I should still have the CDs. (Laughter from the gallery.) In fact, I managed to turn up twelve out of the original sixteen or seventeen disks, which is a pretty good effort considering that I haven't seen them for five years. The package was almost entirely crap... Except for the photos, which while low-resolution (384x256) were sharp and clear, with good composition and a wide variety of subjects. They occupied three of the sixteen (or seventeen) disks... and I found two of them.

Argh! Argh! I can't believe I didn't make a backup! One of the reasons I chew up so much disk space is that I'm paranoid; anything that is useful and cannot be easily replaced is copied and recopied. If it's something I created myself, a copy will sooner or later show up on every partition of every disk of every computer I own. Which is the only thing that will save you when two disks fail from a RAID-5 array. (Which is what appears to have happened.)

But not in this case. In fact, I came across a directory that seemed to have once held a copy of my photo library, but has since been cleaned out to save disk space.

Probably, if I trawl through eBay for long enough, if I search enough file-sharing applications, if I pester enough people, probably I can find a copy of my lost CD #7 of Corel Gallery 1.3 million. But if only I had made a quick copy of it; less than two gigabytes of data for those photos, which is less than three dollars at todays disk prices. Just drag and drop the directory onto one of my many servers; name it something obvious like Pix so that I immediately know what it —

Oh. Look! Look what I found! Now copy. Copy the copy. Burn to DVD!

Only the files of the paranoid survive.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:01 AM

Comments

1 Riiiiiiiiiiiight...

Is this one of those "The voices in my head assure me I'm not crazy." moments?

Posted by: Chris C. at December 14, 2003 10:38 AM (f9aLa)

2 The Pink Sugar Fairy says I shouldn't listen to you.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at December 14, 2003 02:36 PM (jtW2s)

3 Blessed are the pessimists, for they hath made backups.

Posted by: Ted at December 14, 2003 03:51 PM (2sKfR)

4 When Western Civilization collapses and archaeologists in a million years search for evidence of the "Golden Age" of humankind... I shudder to think what their perception of us will be when all they've got to go on is Pixy Misa's files....

Posted by: Tim the Michigander at December 15, 2003 03:09 AM (LzKRr)

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