The eternal sunshine of a spotless hard drive. Not.
Drobo death.
I think a lot of creative people are alike in how they hoard just about everything they create, from fragments to finished (which, of course, are probably not considered to be truly finished), because, well, maybe, somewhere in all that garbage lies the key to doing something great someday.
They fill drawers, attics, garages and these days, especially musicians such as myself, computer hard drives. All of these spaces are vulnerable, but most require some sort of dramatic act of god or idiotic bit of negligence to be irreparably damaged. Maybe there's a flood or a tornado, or maybe you just drop a cigarette on the floor while falling asleep to Dawn of the Dead, which you are watching for the 27th time. But the hard drive, like a drummer for Spinal Tap, can simply self destruct, as mine seems to have done the other day, no act of God or stupidity required.
Mind you, this was no ordinary drive, this was a Drobo, a drive built to not lose data even if a drive inside of it fails. I used my Drobo mostly for back-up, but being the disorganized moron that I am, I also used it to store THE ONLY COPY I HAD of numerous files. To quote Dr. Smith, "Oh, the pain." Yup,. I lost not puny megabytes or even gigabytes but terabytes. Poof, gone, erased.
At first, I was all, "NOT AGAIN" (yes, it has happened to me once before), then PANIC set in, but as the days have passed, I'm now not sure it really matters. Truth be told, the most important stuff -- my photos, music, lyrics and the very few writings that matter -- were also stored elsewhere so I still have them. But here's the really key thing: an overstuffed drive is like any other overstuffed container full of whatever you are convinced you can't live without in that it weighs on you with promises of a-better-life-if-only-you-could-organize-it-in-a-useful-way-someday-and-be-able-to-find-that-gem-that-will-save-your-life-or-at-least-your-sanity. "Feed me, Seymour," it says, every time you so much as glance at it. Well, I hate being told what to do so, honestly, all I can really say is, "Good riddance."
Still... I WANT MY DATA BACK.