I spent about three hours last night going through a shoebox of old external hard drives instead of doing anything on my actual to-do list, and I'd rather write about that than about whatever launched this week.
The shoebox lives under my desk and I think of it as "the archive," which is generous. It's a shoebox. Inside: a 2011 Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex (500GB, bought for $79 at a Fry's that doesn't exist anymore), a WD Passport that clicks when you plug it in (bad sign, I know), and three USB sticks of unknown provenance, one shaped like a sushi roll because apparently that was a thing you could buy in 2013.
I was looking for the raw files from the very first techpad post, back in November 2011. Didn't find them. What I found instead was about four hundred half-finished drafts, a folder called "ideas_FINAL_v3," and a Word doc titled "blog post idea - laptop reviews are dumb" that I wrote and apparently never published. Fifteen years later I still agree with past me.
Here's the part that actually got under my skin, though. None of the drives mounted cleanly. The GoFlex needed a specific USB-A cable I had to dig out of a different box (the "cable graveyard," equally shoebox-shaped, also under my desk). The WD Passport mounted but then just sat there spinning for four minutes before throwing an error about a corrupted directory structure. I ran Disk Utility's First Aid on it, which fixed nothing, because in my experience First Aid has never actually fixed anything, it's basically a stress ball for your data anxiety.
I got maybe 60% of the files off before I gave up for the night.
Why this bugs me more than it should
I've been doing this blog for almost fifteen years and I still don't have a real backup strategy. Not a good one, anyway. I pay $9 a month for Backblaze and mostly forget it exists, and then there's this shoebox, which manages to be both redundant and completely unreliable at once. That's the worst combination you can have. Redundant-but-broken feels safer than it is, which is somehow more dangerous than having nothing.
My actual opinion here, and I'll die on this hill: rotating physical drives is a worse strategy than just picking one cloud backup service and trusting it, even though every instinct I have says otherwise. I grew up thinking "the cloud" was someone else's computer and you shouldn't trust it with anything that matters. Turns out someone else's computer, run by a company whose entire business is not losing your files, degrades a lot slower than a $79 drive sitting in a shoebox at whatever the ambient humidity of my closet is. The drive feels more "mine" and that feeling is doing a lot of unearned work.
I did eventually get the Passport readable again, for what it's worth. Turned out to be a loose header sector thing, and TestDisk (free, open source, ugly as sin, incredible piece of software) rebuilt the partition table in about ninety seconds after Disk Utility spent four minutes doing nothing. If you've never used TestDisk: it looks like it was designed in 2003 because it was, and it still works better than anything Apple ships. That's not a knock on Apple exactly, First Aid is trying to be idiot-proof and TestDisk is trying to actually fix your disk, different goals, but man, when you need the second one the first one is worthless.
Anyway. I didn't find the original 2011 post files. I did find a photo from a old post about a Best Buy display model I once wrote three paragraphs of increasingly unhinged commentary about, which I have zero memory of writing and no memory of the laptop itself. Reading your own thirteen-year-old blog posts is a specific kind of strange. The writing voice is recognizably mine but dumber in a very particular way, more confident about things I clearly hadn't thought through yet.
I'm going to buy a proper NAS this month. I say that every year. Ask me again next May.