Nothing like having your computer crash on you. Ten years of ruminations, diaries, emails, photos of your children, itunes, notebooks filled with half baked ideas vanish. They are consumed by a two week process of hoping for the best and realizing that it will be worse. "It might just be the motherboard, just an electrical problem" --they mean well when they say that, but somehow you know they are going to amputate.
Makes you reassess your relationship to technology. Of course the manuscripts were tucked away safely in back up disks. What you loose in a catastrophic crash is not the book project, it is all the light-weight, playful musings. We know well enough to back-up the career making files, but the pleasures of writing vanish quickly. The long string of playful emails to your sweetheart, the video of your four-year old daughter twirling a hulla-hoop, the tapeworm file on Adalbert Stifter’s novellas, the MLA papers waiting to become articles and all the other gems that you won’t remember until eight months from now when you suddenly realize that you no longer have them. Your laptop has betrayed you as thoroughly as any person ever did.
And with all such disasters, the only thing is to start writing again. Reconstruct the house that was flattened. Rebuild the collection of Meissen and Rosenthal. Of course you will never get the same faded patterns as from before, but you will feel much better holding a cup that reminds you of the one you lost.
And this time, I will back up everything, not just the chapters on Kant and Goethe.
If you have a google account, you could use Google Docs, which is where all my digital sketches and notes, pdfs, images, etc. get thrown.
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