The feeling of accidentally deleting 12 months of work

The trap of being a digital media artist is that just about all your work is stored on a computer. Days like today are close to my worst nightmare given I’m in the middle of a new project and all my working files are ‘out there’ somewhere having accidentally deleted them this afternoon.

While I put some data recovery software to work, I’m sitting here trying to be philosophical about what has happened in the process of trying to back up and reorganise my computer to free up some hard drive space.

I have many, many gigabytes of RAW photo files, mp3 sound files and video in the missing folder. The bird photos I have spent years compiling are all sitting together in one folder for easy access. I have copies of some of these files on other drives, but not the recent material dating back over the past nine months. There are the web versions in various places and a PowerPoint presentation put together only last night of some of the best shots of the past few years…but I still feel sick.

I’m hoping it’s only for now. I should know by morning as it looks like the scan of the drive might take all night.

If I were a painter or printmaker and lost my work in a fire…there would be no data recovery software to potentially bring it back. Being philosophical helps because otherwise after I’ve finished swearing for all its worth, I’d simply want to cry.