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 ...

 Did you ever have one of those years?  You know the kind I mean.  The kind of year when your best laid publication plans get shunted aside by the specter of life itself. Many months ago I began posting a novel I've written here ( The Space between Atoms ).  The idea was simple enough—it gave me a regular source of material for weekly posts on this blog, and it might provide a chance for a reader or two to be drawn into the story.  One of the characters actually appears in my published story, "Friday before Senior Year." The disc drive that holds all my files has gone bad and although it happened months ago, I haven't had the time to send it to a disc repair place.  Many files were lost and I simply haven't had time to recover them.  How do you find time for publishing in such a situation? In December of 2020 I prepared eleven stories for publication.  I only sent out two and they've both been rejected already.  I haven't had time to send the...

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  In fact, the thousands of pieces of my writing yet unpublished do.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...

I remember the days when computer files were saved on disc.  Diskettes, actually.  All my stories were carefully backed up in duplicate.  I felt secure. Technology progressed, as technology will.  The floppy disk gave way to higher capacity storage systems—I had a Jaz drive, once upon a time.  These cassettes, reminiscent of an 8-track, held an enormous amount of data.  But not enough. Computers came with CD drives then, but you couldn't save onto a CD—like the early PDFs.  Then they made CD writers common hardware with your computer.  I began saving everything on CDs.  Large tubes of them fill a forgotten desk drawer. Then came the terabyte drive.  Holding more storage capacity than a moon-launch computer, this little device, used weekly, safely holds my secrets.  Stories are secure at last.  My computer wants me to save them to the Cloud.  And pay for the privilege. So I dutifully backup my hard disc onto the ter...