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Julian Lucas
A staff writer covering books, the arts, and the politics of history
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I’ve always been obsessive about preserving data. I keep every phone and laptop I’ve ever owned in a labelled shoebox, and recently built a PC called THOTH—for the Egyptian god who records the weighing of hearts on the journey to the afterlife—to centralize my records. Little escapes my archival dragnet, from interviews with long-dead relatives to experimental games I coded as a teen. Still, like everyone, I’ve had run-ins with oblivion—first, when I broke a phone containing voice mails from my late father and then when I discovered that two old hard drives from his music studio had mysteriously failed. Attempting to retrieve their contents sent me deep into the world of data recovery, whose practitioners extract files from “dead” media through a kind of digital necromancy.
Illustration by Carolina Moscoso
For this week’s issue, I paid a visit to DriveSavers, one of the leading data-recovery firms in the country. The company has saved files from shredded smartphones, scorched and shipwrecked computers, and even a laptop belonging to Sarah Jessica Parker, who later made an episode about data loss for “Sex and the City.” At DriveSavers’ headquarters, in Novato, California, I tried my hand at “microsoldering” an iPhone logic board, and donned a hazmat-like coverall to disassemble a hard drive in the climate-controlled “clean room.”
Afterward, I spoke with people who’d had life-changing data-loss experiences, including a filmmaker, a victim of L.A.’s Eaton Fire, and the artist Peter Sacks, who switched careers after accidentally deleting a scholarly work in progress. My own quest had a mixed outcome, but I emerged with a new understanding of digital devices as memento mori, whose fragility we ignore at our peril. “Once they have it, it really wasn’t worth anything,” one engineer told me, referring to how carelessly most people treat data. “But, if they don’t have it, it’s worth an arm and a leg and their children.”
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