Dropping Electronic Baggage

So my main hard drive gave up the ghost over the weekend. And yes the picture on the left is fairly accurate in my reaction, but eh.

To be honest, I was actually able to save the majority of my data without much issue – thanks to the fact that so much of my information (e.g. writing) is in the cloud somewhere and even installs like Office or Photoshop are all cloud-based now, it’s not quite as big of a deal.

All my Steam-saved games? Most of those were stored on another drive, so I should be okay there. Same with my iTunes library. (After a while, you realize it’s really lousy to store ALL your data on one drive – and if you can really swing it, a RAID configuration or a NAS is even better, but I don’t have one of those…yet.)

The one thing I did lose was my email. Like pretty much all of it between August 2010 and up to a few days ago. (I have a tendency to POP my messages down to my local drive – especially since over the years I’ve changed email and internet providers and I tend to get a LOT of email – usually more than what the provider would allow me to keep on the server.)

On the other hand, I’m also lazy and I can be a bit of an email hoarder, so this pretty much meant I had upwards of about 60k UNREAD messages at any given time in that inbox. I would go through and delete and archive sometimes, but usually the idea of doing that was fairly overwhelming – even though most of it was crap messages or notifications – or mailing list messages.

Now, I definitely lost some important things and I’m a little bitter about that – particularly because emails are a bit like memories for me. I enjoy sometimes going back and re-reading them (a bit like saving actual letters, I guess?)  And I’m pretty sure I lost some license keys to some software I’ve purchase (though I’ve gotten much better about saving all that info to the cloud as well, so it wasn’t quite as bad as I pictured.)

So even though I did lose some of those memories, I also lost a lot of electronic baggage. Not all memories are good ones and now I’ve got no way to pick at those internal scabs, I guess.

In a way, it’s a bit like starting over. New hard drive. New OS. New installs…and new inbox.

Not such a bad thing, really.