It's been a hard week. On Monday we had a string of technical problems all day: hard drive failures, freezes, network hangs, etc. I remember when a Hampshire grad stopped by one time and talked with us about his experiences working on a technical help desk for a famous video editing software company. He said he would get the same software problems on the same day all across the country. I believe that. There are days that seem like we're trapped in an eddy of swirling malfunctions and "general errors". It's built into the systems – clocks within clocks and they all lock up at the same time. Well it sure feels like that.
Part of the solution is to keep people calm, try to give a reasonable explanation, restore functionality as quickly as possible, make suggestions for going forward, and give emotional support as you leave. Then you walk down the hall shaking you head wondering what the heck's going on. That's the easy part.
Then there's the hard part. A conversation that starts, "My drive is making a funny sound could you take a quick look at it?" It's a friendly division III woman with a 1TB drive that she accidently knocked over on it's side while it was running. We power it up and immediately I know it's the "click of death" sound. The drive is fried. Power down. We take the drive apart to see if it's really the drive or the problem is with the case. There's little chance, but we want to know for sure. Pop it in a Mac Pro tower, power it up, bang, it's the same thing. Quick, pull the plug, power down. It's dead.
At this point there are no easy words of encouragement, there's only silence. A student comes in to ask a question, sees us all standing in silent dread and quickly leaves. My whole division III project is on that drive she says and starts to cry. I don't have a backup, everything is on that one drive. So there we all are one minute we're working in the happy and productive world of digital media, the next we're stuck in the hell of a ephemeral universe that's capricious and uncaring, full of trip wires and spiked pits. You can almost hear the recriminations going through her head. Why didn't I....
I offer the suggestion that her committee might already have enough faith in her project to get a pass out of what she currently has, but she cuts me off quickly, "I don't care about graduating, I only care about my film." Wow, that's just the attitude we want – normally. Bruner quickly steps in and suggests the possibility of sending the drive out to have the files reclaimed and mentions a company. He pulls up their web page and calls them on the phone to get a price quote. It's between $900 and $3,000. It's expensive and uncertain, but maybe it's the only option. I package the drive in bubble wrap, find a small box and we both watch her walk up the stairs obviously shaken.
We give lip-service to the needs of backing up your work, but when it comes to actually doing that we all fail, but it's that quiet failing that remains unnoticed until failing turns into fatality and then we're drawn up short and surprised by the enormity of the situation. As hard drive sizes increase we become smugly satisfied with using them and fail to notice that now more and more of our work is at risk. Quite like our national economy, isn't it. The Black Swan is real and the demise of digital data is as likely today as it will be in the statistical future, but all of us need to get realistic about the realities of digital perils and make them a daily factor, not a perceived distant possibility.
UPDATE:
No, the data recovery did not work. It's all gone. The good news is she's made a terrific comeback on her own. I saw the second part of the three part film and it was really great – interesting animation, done cleverly yet seemingly simple, with an interesting story behind it. All of us who've seen it love it. A job well done and a display of resilience, intelligence, and skill.
gunther
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