K. Marvin Bruce

  I’m so excited.   I’ve finally received a report from the data recovery center and it looks, at this point, like I’ll be able to recover The Space between Atoms .   If so, I’ll be able to resume where we left off starting next week. Recovering data is very expensive.   You see, I had thousands and thousands of files on my backup drive that failed.   It cost more than I’d like to think (let’s just say a new computer would be cheaper) to recover it.   There’s no way I could reconstruct literally over a decade of daily writing. The company I used was kind enough to suggest some better storage solutions.   Hell, these machines look serious.   They also cost a lot of money.   I guess most of us would really not like to think how fragile are data are. Speaking of data, one of the English language watchdog groups—I forget which one—has now declared that singular verbs can be used with “data.”   Data is the plural of datum, but we tend to use ...

An external disk crash is a tragedy.  You see, my computer doesn't have much memory.  The little it has is claimed by the increasing size of the operating system at each update.  I back my files up on a WD terabyte drive. The drive failed this week.  Although I hope to get the contents recovered, the remaining chapters of The Space between Atoms reside on that drive.  In fact, the thousands of pieces of my writing yet unpublished do. I don't trust the cloud.  How can you trust something where your files, like a Heisenbergian electron can't be precisely traced?  I like to know where my files are.  Right now they're nowhere.  The silly drive whirs and ticks like an electronic idiot, but it doesn't show where the files are. Data recovery, I've discovered, costs eight times the cost of a disk drive.  The lesson?  Buying half a dozen backup drives is cheaper.  If one disk fails your files are still somewhere. Months of my life went...