I’m a bit of a techie; I take pictures and edit videos in the other half of my life. I have multiple backups for all of the media I’ve amassed over the years, but store my most important stuff in the cloud and on a 4TB external hard drive attached to my computer. Storage space on a Mac laptop comes at a premium, so I just keep this drive connected via industrial Velcro to the top of my computer and plug it in to access the data.
I have years and years of pictures and videos stored on this drive. In fact, I literally have about 100 years of pictures on it because of doing so many family genealogical projects. It’s why many of my friends call me The Memory Keeper. I generally keep a backup of most of this info, but hadn’t done a full backup in 6 months.
A week and a half ago, with only hours left to finish a major 9 minute video project for our church’s Vacation Bible School night program, my computer no longer would show the data that was on the drive. I had no access to all of the 4 terabytes and nearly 100 years of memories I had been storing on this device.
It was crippling.
I tried umpteen fixes, multiple cables in case it was a wiring problem, and countless software strategies. I could tell the drive was getting power because I could feel it spinning and the little light was on, but I could not access the data on it. I was sweating under the clock, with my stomach in knots as my thoughts went into overdrive recalling all of the things that would be lost because I didn’t have a completely updated backup, not to mention the time crunch I was under before hundreds of people would be waiting to see this video I could not finish.
At one point, I literally put my head down and prayed about it, but was, frankly, quite angry at God for allowing this to happen when I was trying to do something good…for His church, no less! I finally found a rough workaround that wasn’t ideal, but got the job done. Then, I put my laptop away and didn’t touch it for over a week other than a silly task here and there. The thought of troubleshooting it seemed too dauntless because I knew I had tried so many other options that led me nowhere and I was really, honestly starting to get almost depressed about the fact that I could not access this data.
And that’s when I realized this was less about a hardware or software lesson, and so much more about God teaching me a very important heart lesson.
My trivial hard drive issue paled so much in comparison to my friend’s struggle with Alzheimer’s Disease, yet the parallels were, on the most fundamental levels, eerily similar. Her mind, like my external drive, still spins. The data is still in there, stored in the memory, but there is a disconnect in being able to access it. And I can only scratch the surface of understanding how tremendously terrifying and frustrating that is for her. Especially when there isn’t a whole lot of troubleshooting advice out there to try.
For me, I found a software patch that allowed me to pull all of the memories off the old drive and put them on a new drive after only a few hours of work and $113. For my sweet friend, however, the struggle continues. If only repairing our own hard drive issues was such an easy fix…
