Further notes from the Recovery

Almost three years ago I had a cataclysmic computer failure in which I lost a great number of my files. I thought I was protected because of my Windows back-up system… but that was not backing up. The only part of the loss that really bothered me was the loss of so many scans of artwork. Most of these images were organized into folders which gave the name of the project, the notes from the work, scans of the pencil sketches, scans of the artwork and then the final scans ready for layout — so there was a lot of info in there. I liked being able to look back over previous projects and being able to see what I did… sometimes using these files as reference to new work. In many cases I no longer own the original, so a good quality scan is all I have left. I tried a few recovery solutions and got some of it back but nothing was really satisfactory, so I set the hard drive aside.

Recently I tried Data Rescue for the second or third time and I was amazed at how much I got back. Perhaps the trick is to run scans several times. My folder system is completely fucked up… I am currently spending a lot of time digging through the folders of recovered materials that the recovery program generated  to find my pictures and in most cases I’ll probably never be able to match all images with the publications they appeared in, but it’s a better solution than any of the others I have tried. Currently I am spending an hour or so a night digging through the folder and trying to find all of the files I want to keep. It’s a time consuming process, but it’s not really something I cna figure out how to automate.

I continue to work on my writing as time allows. I’ve always been interested in editorial non fiction in the style of Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Twain, etc. I doubt I have even a drop of the talent or vision it would take to write such work ‘for real,’ but I like to try my hand at writing in order to explore my thoughts on a given subject. I think I do this instead of writing a journal. In any case, I’ve discovered that I need to write one draft, save it and then go through and snip out all the occurances of ‘in my opinion…’ and ‘I assume’ and ‘I thought…’ and other apologetic sounding phrases. What is it about me that makes me want to apologize so much?