Sometimes it feels painful as journalism gets more personal.  It used to be surprising when a journalist would write "this reporter" when referring to themeselves.  Now days more mainstream writers are talking about I and me all the time.

I tend to read Virginia Heffernan's posts in the NY Times magazine because she usually explores areas that relate to my work, even though I battle with how much I care about her life particulars.  In this case, she has an important, and always personal - cautionary tale.  It's not if, but when....

The Great Crash (condensed)

How was I so easily fooled? Looking back, I should have seen that in our last hours together my drive was not at all well. It was only putting on a brave face — preparing to die.

I set off for a Mac fix-it shop called Mikey’s Hook-Up

Alas, Matthew Kane, a technician I spoke with by phone, seemed grave. “All drives eventually fail,” he said.

“Do you back up?” Kane asked.

I told the truth: “Never.”

I had photos and songs on my drive, and I also had Word-file diaries...

Kane called me - He’d been unable to retrieve any data. The drive wouldn’t even spin.

Would I like to send the drive off to a data-recovery court of last resort called DriveSavers? Its technicians would clone every garbled sector of it and reassemble it.  ... if they recovered data they would charge me up to $2,700, depending on how much work they had to do.

Kane assured me that DriveSavers was the best in the business.

They were really nice at DriveSavers, but they got nothing. Not a dot of data, not a fragment of an overheated e-mail message or a sad note of a Nick Drake song.

To see the complete article, click the link below.
Source:  The New York Times