I have not felt good for days, a terrible headache. I went to The Met to try and get out of the house for a couple of hours yesterday. We wandered from room to room and looked at images and stared down artifacts.
I discovered that a great many notes that I had made in my phone had been deleted. A long and disconnected stream of ideas for writing, snippets of conversations to myself, randomly overheard statements, phrases, poems,etc. I had thought that these notes were being backed up in my mail app. on my computer but when I went and looked I found that they are sync'd, so the notes had been deleted from there as well.
How much more useless can technology be?
I plugged in my external backup drive and figured that I'd search through the mail folder on there and recover the documents from that archive.
Nope. Failed, all of it.
So what started out as an attempt to recover a few lost files from my phone has revealed systemic failure from the ground up. It is heartbreaking, of course. Not because of the lost files, but because now it means I will need to do many things to even get to a point that I am comfortable with believing my data is safe. I will need to spend money, and time.
For weeks there were double copies of all of my notes being generated. I never bothered figuring out why. I won't bore you with the details, but it was something that I couldn't bring myself to troubleshoot. I was able to delete the extra notes without a problem and I figured that I would just figure it out eventually, but not now. Now the phone seems to be randomly deleting the originals, some of which are not backed up anywhere, though they should be, somewhere.
I logged onto gmail and searched my trash folder. Every other imaginable worthless and forgotten communique was there, no notes.
There are so many systems in place that are supposed to prevent this sort of thing from happening, but there it is.
Unstoppable, it seems, progress.
My headache marches on and on, unreachable by the disaster of technology, but somehow preserved by it.
