Narcissis and ‘The Click of Death’

So many files, such little time. I move around life with a seemingly endless form of low panic, thinking I’ll never catch up with, or organise all the files I’ve stored. We surely create more files than we can ever re-experience? I have about 8 hard drives, full of old laptop and phone back-ups, vital music sessions, endless digital photos (and back up of 1000’s of analogue photos) . And creative video making sessions. They are chaotic and a lot of them are probably unopenable because the software application is out of sync with the device version. 

I think of cavemen and women, ‘hunter gatherers’, and I am full of admiration. With their clubs and matted hair and loin cloths. Not a photo or file between them. They just got on with it. Ug! Eat. Sh*t. Run. F*ck. Mumble. Make tools. Light fires. Repeat. Not much of a footprint!

But me? I am a digital hoarder. Because some part of me thinks that the whole world will be interested in the 7000 terabytes of stuff that I will have saved by the time I’m gone. What an ego! How vain am I? Who will have the time in future to go through and celebrate all these things that are mostly useless to them. They will be too busy documenting every second of their own life after all! (I see that some artists, e.g., Florence and The Machine, Tool, and Bob Dylan are now banning phones at gigs to encourage fans to stop endless videoing videos that they’ll never look at, and to encourage them to focus on the actual experience).

To defend examples of really essential backing up of things, I can imagine there has been many famous artistic works and historical documents and medical/scientific data and inventions that have been accidentally lost forever. Imagine The Beatles were at the height of their powers in a digital world, and somebody lost or corrupted the only existing session files of the White Album before its release. Imagine somebody dropped the hard drive with those songs on it. This has happened to a lot of artists ...anybody from the Beach Boys to Foo Fighters to Kanye West.

Well, I dropped my External hard drive a few days ago. Not quite The White Album in its historical importance, but there was an unreleased mini -documentary I made of The Frames in 2004! ( If you are interested in viewing this and more please sign up to my Patreon). And lots of music and drumming files. And most recently, what I felt was the best footage I have ever taken for the making of a Mark Geary video ( If you are also interested in viewing a clip of this, please sign up to my Patreon)  And I felt responsible to everyone involved in the making of this, not least Mark, who had to sit in a bath for an hour in a yellow mac and sing bubbly lyrics into the water, surrounded by 14 rubber ducks.

Anyway, I was told that, even if the data was recoverable, that it would cost e1200-1700 to recover by men in ‘a clean room’ lab with white coats, high tech equipment, and dust particle removers. 

I’m such an idiot because, as I backed up my overfull laptop recently, I deleted all the files from the laptop, thinking …well that’s 'backed up' now. But all I did was move my files. So, when this back up fell on the floor while in use, a cold dread rushed through my blood system. This could be bad, I thought.

"Did you hear a digital click", they asked?

"Yes".

"Oh. That's 'The Click Of Death', as we say in IT".  Shit. My turn to fall on the floor. Hopefully the men in the white coats can help me.

We obsess, some of us, about back-ups and saving stuff. But what about emotional back-ups? People back ups? What if our own mental or emotional hard drive gets overfull or damaged or takes a fall? Do we have someone to bring us back to our preferred state? Do we have each other’s backs? Or are we already lost in a forest of our own files, stopping to gaze at our own reflections only, unaware of the scorched earth and the ghosts of our ancestors howling at us to wake up and smell the roses. Hopefully the former and were not like the lad below here.