Recently, I've had a somewhat illuminating experience with a compromised external hard drive. Essentially, bad sectors occured on my Toshiba drive, so my laptop alerted me that it couldn't be accessed unless it was formatted, which would obviously erase its content. Tediously attempting to recover the images on there resulted in some corruption, which turned out very interesting indeed. This event and process caused me an unreasonable amount of stress, leading me to ruminate on a few things, explained below.
1. I am a digital hoarder.
I managed to recover my downloaded images from my recycle bin successfully with no hassle and immediately backed them up on Google Drive. However, in my earlier panicked state upon discovering that the drive was broken, I didn't think of this and began freaking out about losing my precious shinies that I had so carefully collected over the past year or so. I like to save and store moodboard images and inspiration, because I don't trust them to be online forever. Stored alongside them were my very first Canon RAW and JPEG files from learning to use a DSLR, which at the time, I couldn't bear to lose. There is also the hoarding dimension to this behaviour, which has clearly evolved from physical objects in my childhood (papers, potential scrapbooking materials, rubbish that could be used for toys, etc.) to digital. Having stepped back and moved on from all this, it's quite eye-opening to remember how genuinely distraught and wounded I felt by this. Like going through the five stages of grief but with images. I hoard Chrome browser tabs as well - no less than 30 at a time, going into the 70's on a particularly bad week. Atop this, when I don't feel I can come around to looking at certain tabs in time, I'll bookmark them under meticulously organised folders. This could easily spin off into a longer tangent about information overload, attention spans, anxious thinking, virtual escapism, completionism and bad digital habits, but I'll save it for now. Time to begin a slow but necessary cleanse.
2. I should primarily be using the Cloud for permanent file storage.
I was on call with my dad trying to fix this situation, since he has worked professionally with computers his whole life, and he strongly encouraged me to use hard drives only for transporting files between physical locations (e.g. home and uni). You cannot drop, break or lose the Cloud. While it does have its issues, being extra thoughtful about passwords and security can greatly minimise the chances of online storage attacks. On top of having a slightly cheaper, not-so-reputable-brand drive, I believe I only unsafely ejected it once, whereas several of my peers never remember to do so with their own. I rhetorically ask my dad in exasperation, "Why out of everyone, this happens to me?" He responds, "Thousands of people drive without seatbelts and never crash, except for those few who do." Great big cosmic joke on Milo ended up teaching me some valuable lessons, in my opinion.
3. Occasionally, destruction can produce beauty.
Aesthetics are incredibly if not entirely subjective. Personally, I have long been an admirer of glitch art, a popular art movement that has only gained traction since people began experimenting with databending/datamoshing their files, making wider statements about the way computers see data and the fragility/malleability of 1s and 0s. During the long file recovery process, I got a visceral flashback to a Vsauce YouTube video I'd watched maybe 6 years ago, titled: 'Where Do Deleted Files Go?'
At the time, this was mind-blowing stuff to me. Particularly though, I remembered Michael's reference to photographer Melanie Willhide, who managed to salvage deleted, damaged photos after her laptop was stolen in 2010 and ended up embracing their new look, taking on a new direction with her exhibition and future work. In describing the resulting series, she said it's about "... the sort of dependency [I've] grown to have on this machine to house all these images that are really important and how delicate they are.” Her work (shown below) pushed the medium of photography into the new, complex and exciting realm of the digital, with countless artists, even videographers today using heavy manipulation in post-processing to emulate distorted effects. To me now, knowing how glitch art exploded after this, these images take on a really digitally transgressive quality.
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