The computer gave me a scare again. Applications quitting unexpectedly and repeatedly. Failure of the damn thing to respond. Refusing to do what it’s supposed to do.

Bear with me while I scream, This is not supposed to happen to a new machine!

It forced me to finally get with it and pay for an automatic online backup system though. I can’t afford to lose more data. So far, it’s managed to back up 0.2%. This is going to take a while.

Last month’s crash had some small tragedies that I didn’t notice at the time. I paid (quite a bit) for a full recovery of my data, and while all my work data was restored, the company managed to miss out on some stuff. Several documentaries that I’d downloaded for research are gone (and now I have to dig out all the names again), but what hurt the most was that I lost all my journal entries for the last three years.

It feels… uh, I don’t quite know how it feels. On the one hand, it’s a fresh start, a new beginning. It’s not like I looked at the journal anyway. Like the Buddhists, I created something, and now it’s destroyed. The joy was in the writing of it, not in the saving. I did indeed enjoy writing that journal, and it’s not like I would have ever needed it again.

On the other hand, it was a chronicle of my life, of my relationships, my battles, my feelings, my successes, and my failures. I could go back to that journal and figure out the exact date I started a project, what I was doing on a particular day in 2005, or how I felt during a certain period. And now I don’t have that anymore. I no longer have that backed-up chronicle of my life to go to when I wonder what I was doing at a particular point of time.

In a way, it’s a release. Over, done with. Move on.

On the other hand, that long hard journey I’ve undertaken over the last few years? There’s absolutely no written record of it.