Air Poppers of Content

I have a confession. On the job, I’m diligent about organizing my files and using enterprise resources to store them in a logical manner. I pride myself on using layers of folders to manage individual projects and work streams.

What occurs on my personal laptop is the opposite.

While I still create dozens of folders, giving them readily understandable names, and snuggling them in groupings, I have data sprawl. More appropriately, I produce volumes of files and photos that is akin to a hot air popcorn popper constantly spewing out and replicating content everywhere onto my PC and across multiple, disparate clouds. I’ve amassed sizable bowls—external hard drives—to gather it up and organize it, but as soon as I believe I have a handle on a collection, I generate more.

My negligence, in taming my content, turned into my worst fear in mid-October. I’d taken my trusty 8-year-old Lenovo Carbon laptop on a lengthy cruise, so I could continue working on the book I was writing. I was acutely aware that I needed to get a new PC, but kept procrastinating. While it was a little slow to boot-up and searched for internet connections when I emancipated it from its docking station, I kept reasoning it’d be okay for another few months.

Two weeks into the cruise, having written hours nearly every day, my laptop refused to boot up. I could hear it whirling, and thinking it was no different than a car, kept hoping it’d eventually turn-over if I kept pressing the power button or plugged it into a different outlet. No luck.

I immediately thought about the actress Margot Kidder who had a nervous breakdown after a virus infected her computer, causing it to crash, deleting nearly three years of work on her autobiography. Like Kidder, there was nothing I could do. I was miles off the Mexican coast.

The only tranquility I could muster was to visualize bringing it to the magicians at Geek Squad. They could pull the data off and put it onto a new PC. In the meantime, my stomach knotted, every time I saw my deceased PC. And I grieved not being able to write, except using an archaic pen and paper.?

The day after I got home, I scurried to Best Buy/Geek Squad. The told me not to stress. They could access the data. Then they opened my PC. The hard drive had a proprietary connection. They would need to send the hard drive away, and it would be weeks before they could transfer my data to a new laptop.

Weeks! WEEKS!

Then I remembered. My PC was backed up daily to an online backup service. I purchased a new laptop that afternoon and provided them with the login for the service. Having to wait a few days to get my sleek, new PC, I browsed on my husband’s laptop, and was relieved that my content on Microsoft OneDrive—including photos from ages ago on SkyDrive—was intact, and I could access my email with no issues. Additionally, my stadium-sized collection of photos was blissfully lounging on Google Photo.

The same wasn’t true for Amazon Drive. Years ago, our home server was starting to show signs of obsolescence, so my husband placed our archived photos and files on Amazon Drive. I’d access the drive via a path from my browser. Days before our cruise, I wrote and saved several letters to Amazon Drive. When I logged in from my husband’s computer, however, the only content was from 2016 or earlier. Everything that I’d saved to the drive for the past six years was gone!

I looked on our backup service, thinking the data was there, but it wasn’t. More accurately, I hadn’t the foggiest idea what I was looking at with program files, powershells, dumpstacks, swapfiles, roots, tubers, and secret tunnels and storehouses [okay, I made up the last part].

When I picked up my new PC, days later, I was hoping the path to the Amazon Drive was there, and perhaps, the files had been saved to another Amazon Drive. Nope.

I called Amazon three times over the course of two weeks, and they kept insisting that I’d deleted the files. I explained, there’s no way I deleted six years’ worth of photos and files while on a cruise, in the middle of the ocean, with no access to the Internet [because I was too cheap to buy it] with a PC that wouldn’t boot up.

While the story starts off tragic, six weeks later, a magician, associated with Geek Squad, in some mystery location, was able to access my Lenovo hard drive, and recover 93.9 GB of data, including 24,078 photos, and 428 documents. I have no idea how content, which appeared to be on Amazon Drive—with the Amazon branding and functionality--was resident on my personal PC. ?

There’s no moral to the story, only the undeniable truth that I’m producing caldrons of content and I haven’t the foggiest idea where everything is located and what’s unique and what’s replicated.

I don’t think I’m alone. The ease of taking photos on a smartphone, and then have them automatically replicated and saved to a cloud has resulted in tsunamis of personal content. According to Earthweb, there are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day.[1] Every day, 333.2 billion emails are sent, 3 billion Skype calls are made, and 5 billion Snapchat videos and photos are shared. By 2025, the amount of data generated each day is expected to reach 463 exabytes globally.[2] And it’s estimated 1,200 petabytes of data are stored by digital media giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.[3]

For many, like myself, we merrily chug along, producing more-and-more data, and don’t realize there could potentially be an issue until there’s a hiccup in our ability to access it. In the “good old days,” we had photo albums and file cabinets. Now we have repositories, which can become inaccessible, forgotten, or corrupted.

In August, Amazon announced they’re discontinuing their cloud file storage service, which was designed to store the array of files. By the end of the year, customers will no longer have access to their files through Amazon Drive apps. Getting their photos, videos, and documents onto the drive was automatic. Removing and relocating them is a lengthier process. It took me nearly a week to select, download, and then move small chunks to an external hard drive. ???

I now have the content from 2016 and earlier on one hard drive. And the misplaced content along with the earlier files on the 1 TB hard drive I received from Geek Squad. I’m waiting for divine intervention to tell me how to combine the two and sift out the duplicates. In the meanwhile, I can hear the air popper in the background as I continue to snap photos, shoot videos, and create documents. ?

Note: Uncountable popcorn kernels were popped in the pursuit of this photo.

[1] How Much Data Do We Create Every Day in 2022?, Earthweb, December 18, 2022

[2] How Much Data is Created Every Day? +27 Staggering Stats, Seed Scientific, October 28, 2021

[3] Ibid.?