i've lost my digital life. i can't find the majority of my audio/graphic/video files. so many of my precious babies are gone. those folders are my main ones. i thought they were backed up from my pc that i abandoned onto my portable hard drive. they are not in the hard drive. they are not on my mac laptop. my abandoned pc is miles away in america at my mom's house.

these are pictures i've been collecting for years. all sorts of things. i stopped collecting hard copies and went digital. film related (dietrich, novak), music related (all my favorite bands), personal pictures (i could scan them again but that would take ages), pictures others sent to me, pictures i scanned from magazines, pictures just for fun, etc. the same goes for the video files. i had digitized tons of footage and was planning to shape them into something. i had messed around with different formats and wasn't really happy with the results because i wanted best quality at smallest size, which just doesn't exist. so i left them. left them to sit and wait until i had time to work on them or until technology improved. all the music i had been working on. my cathartic release of my old life was going to come in the shape of a 'solo record' if you will. those are gone. the web sites i was going to make. i had already created the templates and such. fuck!

i can't remember if i:
1. erased the files from the pc after thinking that i backed them up
2. in a mad rush to leave for new zealand, never finished backing up the files and they are sitting there still, waiting for me, waiting for mommy to rescue them
3. i didn't delete the somewhat outdated backup copies that are on zip disks (i think i put all the files from zip disks into the pc and then erased all the zip disks so that they were fresh)

i hope that:
1. my precious files are still in the computer
2. my mom hasn't reformatted the drive or erased the files somehow by emptying the recycle bin
3. if they're all gone, that at least the program acid is still in the pc or the pc we sold to a friend 'cos i still have my loops and acid files that i used to construct my songs (i know it's just acid but i got really attached to the things i made and some of them were even for music study, such as i reconstructed reich's "clapping music")

i only frantically realized that all these files are gone, (somewhere in the back of my mind i swore that they were backed up onto the portable hard drive and i could just go around and dig them out when i wanted them), because i saw a flyer for a ipod night at a club where everyone can bring in their ipod and play about 10-15 minutes from a playlist. i wanted to have a kiwi debut of my own music. that would have been so cool. now that moment will never be. my songs are gone. shit. i feel like such an idiot. it's too hot and i'm too in a panic to even think rationally about what could have happened to all these files. i was going to make a web gallery of my travel photography too. damn, all those files are gone. i can't believe it. this sucks.

well, i suppose it was the easy way of a cathartic release of my past life. just throw all your computer files in the trash and empty it out. boom! your past life is gone. why is it that i still have all the stupid files in my computer? why did i make sure that i had transferred those to the laptop? i just don't get it. all my stupid little notes about crap and my stupid little poems which i have hand-written copies of anyway.

oh yeah, i never saved my bookmarks either. but i was well aware of that before. this on top of it just blows. it really takes the cake. it's all the tired clichés. laugh. laugh all you want. i'm already depressed for other reasons so i'm pretty numb to this discovery of lost files. goddamn, this sucks! i cannot emphasize enough how much this sucks. i just keep rambling on and on about it. i don't know if my subconscious will let me sleep tonight. damn!

see kids, never do anything in a hurry.
and never EVER empty the trash until you are sure and have double-checked, triple-checked that you still have a copy. that you truly backed it up.
let me re-word that. back up onto at least 2 different media formats.
then you'll be sure... you have your files.... you have your precious babies.

8 years of my digital life gone.
i am such an idiot!

old cemetery under grafton bridge off symonds street