⊕we have a lot of fun here at suboptimalism dot net, but i’d like to be serious for just a moment: do not actually bury hard drives in the backyard, it’s probably not good for the environment or somethingcoming back from my recent eclipse trip, during which i left my computer at home running the entire time (seed your torrents, kids!), i discovered i could no longer access anything stored on my oldest hard drive. several restarts and physical reconfigurations later, i was forced to conclude that the drive was either dead or in a terminal coma. all in all it had an excellent run, according to internet folklore the average lifespan of a hard drive is just 3-5 years (although this fact is repeated across hundreds of sites on the internet, ultimately they all seem to lead back to the same source). it was the dependable bedrock of my desktop computing experience for over a decade, having been the original hard drive of my first desktop computer, some kind of prebuilt dell thing that i’m almost positive my mom bought at costco. when i became a Real PC Gamer® years later and “built” my own pc, in the interest of thrift, convenience, and continuity, i took it out and reused it as the main mass storage device (paired with an SSD for the OS). i was well aware at the time that i was tempting fate by using such an old drive, but i stubbornly went ahead anyway, just to be defiant. i suppose i was vindicated in the end, because in retrospect that was only the midpoint of my hard drive’s lifespan. since then, it outlived 3 motherboards and 1 case, gained a companion (a 4 TB WD blue), and travelled several thousand miles, surviving abuse at the hands of baggage handlers for amtrak and multiple airlines.

i can’t say there weren’t any warning signs that the hard drive was close to failure, i recall noting as long as a year ago that the hard drive was making some ominous clicking/skipping noises. i'm no expert but i assume that like with most computing components, you never want to hear anything out of hard drives besides a gentle, reassuring hum. in fact, i had plans to back up the whole thing next week just kidding, of course i had no plans to back it up ever. i’ve known on an intellectual level for a while that i should back up and replace it, but there was simply no way it was ever actually going to happen. it’s hard to say why, exactly. maybe i had grown complacent, confident that the drive could last a century now that it had lasted a decade. maybe it was for the same reason that the underground man refuses to see a doctor about his liver.

i tried to recall what there had even been to back up, the precious data that i had just lost. the drive hadn't seen much use in recent years, serving mostly as cold storage for a bunch of steam games i haven't played for years (if at all). naturally, those are all easy to replace. i did, however, have my default downloads folder on that drive for historical reasons, which i used on an almost daily basis. although the folder was extensive, most of its content was ephemeral and by its nature could probably still be found online somewhere where it came from. i soon realized that the most painful loss, perhaps the only one, was my minecraft screenshots folder. it probably contained in excess of 5,000 images, the only record of what had been a decade-long obsession. now they were all gone, save for a select few that had made their way to other places...

then i remembered, aha!, the screenshots folder had been so precious that against all odds, i actually had backed it up at one point, on my external hard drive. i dug it up, plugged it in, and sure enough the folder was there. i scrolled through it, but something was off, there weren't nearly enough screenshots in it. had the drive gotten corrupted somehow? then i looked at the dates and realized that the backup i had imagined in my mind as being relatively recent and complete was actually over eight years old, created in 2016, long before some of the greatest shenanigans.

looking through the old screenshots rescued by the external hard drive lifeboat, i noticed that the vast majority of them weren't very interesting anyway. i took hundreds of screenshots of conversations in chat for potential use as evidence later, either to exonerate myself or for blackmail (minecraft is serious business!). i almost never ended up using any of those screenshots for anything, but for years i continued to compulsively screenshot anything mildly spicy in chat just in case. another popular screenshot genre was coordinates of random bases and towns and things for reference, in case i ever needed to find them again later for raids and whatnot (later i got a waypoint mod that cut down on that). the only screenshots that were of any interest to me now years down the line were of cool things i'd built and fun things i'd done with friends, which represented only a tiny fraction of the screenshot hoard. investigating various storage places on my computer and online, i turned up a lot of those sorts of screenshots from the years after 2016, inadvertently perserved by my past self as a record of my best moments. all in all i probably hadn't lost any of the most significant screenshots, the hard drive failure had only been some serendipitous spring screenshot clearing.

the funny thing is that something like this happened almost exactly a year ago, when i accidentally deleted a bunch of pages from my site. near the end of the post, i mention briefly that i'm not entirely convinced that the perfect recall and mass data preservation that computers enable is unequivocally a good thing. no longer limited by physical constraints thanks to advances in technology, the radical preservationists are now ascendant, nothing preventing them from pursuing their maniacal quest of ensuring that every scrap of data ever created endures eternally. what is even the point of preservation, we should ask. does everything really need to, deserve to be preserved? the indiscriminate preservation of the digital age seems to have perverted the very act of preservation, enacting preservation as fetish, preservation for its own sake. the subjects of preservation are no longer considered in and of themselves. ultimately it is the hoarder mentality, the inability to let go of worldly possessions extended to combinations of ones and zeroes, the inability to accept transience, impermanence, death. it is time to let data die. as i wrote last year, in this age of reckless unchecked data creation and storage, one of the boldest actions you can take is deliberate deletion."this is why i consider bikobatanari a hero this post's reading assignment is hōjōki (which i read alone on a mountain).