I found an external hard drive in the closet on Sunday while I was supposedly looking for a box fan. Not looking for it, not remembering I even owned it. Just a black 2TB Western Digital brick with a USB cable wrapped around it in a rubber band that had gone sticky with age. Plugged it into an adapter (because of course nothing on my current laptop takes USB-A anymore) and there it was: a full folder tree from 2012 through about 2015, labeled in that overly careful way I used to name things, "2013_07_VACATION_FINAL_v2."
It took me a solid hour to stop working and start scrolling.
This blog turns fifteen in November, which is a stupid number to sit with. Fifteen years of a personal tech blog is basically an eternity in internet time — most sites that started when this one did are gone, redirected to a parked domain, or quietly became someone's crypto newsletter around 2021 and never looked back. I went and reread a few posts from the first year, and honestly they're rough. Overwrought, way too many exclamation points, an entire post dedicated to how excited I was about a Motorola phone that I'm fairly sure I sold within eight months. But there's something almost touching about how earnest it all is. No SEO brain yet. No sense that anyone besides four friends and my mom would ever read it.
The hard drive itself is a different story and honestly kind of a mess. About 40% of the files won't open cleanly — some of the RAW photos are fine, but a chunk of the video files are in a codec that apparently nothing wants to touch anymore without a conversion tool I had to hunt down and install, and even then two clips just refused. I don't think I lost anything I'll actually miss. But it's a good reminder that "I backed it up" and "I can still get to it in ten years" are two completely different promises, and I keep confusing them. My actual current backup situation is a mix of one cloud service, one NAS I built badly in 2019 and never properly maintained, and, now apparently, whatever's left rotting in a box in the closet. That is not a system. That is hoarding with extra steps.
The heat isn't helping
Also, unrelated but not really: it's been miserable here the past week, the kind of heat where the laptop fan spins up just from Slack being open, and I've had the AC running basically nonstop, which means I've also been checking my electric bill obsessively like that's going to change anything. I moved my desk setup into the one room in the apartment that actually cools down, which happens to be the room with the worst light for video calls, so now I look like I'm being interrogated for every meeting. Small price to pay. I'm not moving it back.
Anyway, back to the drive. What actually got me wasn't the photos, it was a folder of old drafts, blog posts I apparently wrote and never published. There's one from March 2013 complaining about RSS readers dying off after Google Reader got shut down, half-finished, trailing off mid-sentence like I got bored or got interrupted by something more urgent. Reading it now is a little eerie because I remember being genuinely mad about that shutdown, and I'd honestly forgotten it happened at all until this draft reminded me. Fifteen years does something to your memory of what felt like a big deal at the time.
I copied the salvageable stuff onto the NAS, finally, properly, with actual folder names this time instead of whatever "FINAL_v2" nonsense I was doing in 2013. I'm sure in another decade I'll find some other drive I forgot about, plug it into whatever the connector standard is by then, and go through the same routine of feeling nostalgic and slightly ashamed of my past organizational habits at the same time.
If you've got an old drive sitting in a drawer somewhere, this is your nudge to go check what's actually still readable on it before the format that photos and videos are saved in becomes even more of a hassle to open. Mine barely made it. Yours might not.