There's nothing like a brush with hard-drive failure to make you contemplate your mortality.

Or at least, contemplate the ephemerality of all things digital.

I was pretty lucky. I'm fairly regular about backing up my files. When the big drive that holds my life's work started acting up, there wasn't too much on it that needed to be copied. But it was acting so erratically that it took me most of the weekend to dump that stuff onto other disks. And since I didn't have another big disk handy, now it's spread across thumb drives and other older computers.

I was nervous. I've been taking an awful lot of pictures lately, and I would have been devastated to lose them.

All those memories. All those experiences I walked past in a flash, and haven't had the time to look at and process yet.

So right now, my digital life is spread across a lot of aging, precarious hardware. Working from a backup drive connected over a creaky USB-2 connection is less than ideal as well. Each hesitation of the system has me wondering if this is the end. Clearly it's time to buy some new hardware and get the important stuff back in one place.

Clearly there are worse things that can happen. Like... whatever news this poor woman was reading as I walked past.

It's amazing, isn't it, how much the seminal events of our lives are mediated and shaped by our technology?

20 years ago, and she would have received this message on an answering machine, at home. 60 years ago, and it probably would have come in the mail.

When we are constantly connected to the entire world, we live more and more of our lives in public. And in the information age, the moments of those lives can last forever.

Or be lost in an instant, to a hard-drive crash.

What do you suppose she was reading?

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