Thoughts On Lost Files

Of all the people mentioned in the Bible, the Prophet Jeremiah would best understand how I feel about loosing my computer’s hard drive and all the files on it.

About six weeks ago my computer’s power source overheated melting little plastic yellow things inside and corrupting the hard drive.

This hard drive contained 20+ years of research, notes and partially finished book manuscripts. The notes for one historical novel alone ran close to 900 pages.

Yes, I made backup discs for some things, but I have not kept them up-to-date. I’m constantly going back and forth between files and writing projects to refine them, so who knows what I backed up or when.

My son Donald, a computer whiz, cannibalized parts from several different old computers to build the one I’m writing on this morning. He put a lot of anguished labor into getting me online again; but he has not been able to resurrect my old dead hard drive. Looks like the stuff that was on there is lost forever.

Loosing all this material leaves me in a quandary.

When Donald first told me that he may not be able to restore my files, the news stunned me.

My thoughts ranged from bleak despair – All my work, all my life, has been worthless or God would not have let it all be destroyed – to a feeling of freedom’s elation – I can retire! No more sitting for hours at the computer till my tailbone aches! I’m free!

I questioned whether loosing everything was from the hand of God, Who might not want me mudding up His reputation with my writings; or from the devil who fears truth; or whether my trouble might just be a normal vicissitude of life that everyone endures.

I though of flood victims along the Mississippi River who are loosing their homes this week and of forest fire victims in California who see their homes and everything in them burn in a matter of seconds this same week. And I compare their great losses to my pain at just loosing a few computer files.

Then I thought of the homosexual guy I talked with over breakfast Monday in Dave’s Dinner; he’d just come from the funeral of his partner of 22 years. What is my loss compared to that poor bastard’s?

Damn, but I’m self-centered!

I also remember William Carey’s example. He’s known as the Father Of Modern Missions. He served in India for 40 years beginning in 1793. A master linguist, Carey translated the Bible into 34 languages; and he worked by lamplight while his wife, driven insane during a cholera epidemic, raged violently in restraints in the next room.

And he worked without a computer.

If I read the record correctly, (I included a chapter about him in my book Strangers On The Earth). about 1830, the house caught fire and Carey rescued his wife and let ten of his Bible translation manuscripts burn to ashes.

He started to reproduce those manuscripts by hand all over again from scratch.

When his manuscripts burned, Carey said, “I wish to be still and know that the Lord He is God, and to bow to His will in everything. He will no doubt bring good out of this evil and make it promote His interests – but at present the Providence is exceedingly dark”.

So California fire victims and Mississippi flood victims and the homosexual guy and the missionary all lost things important to them. I should feel ashamed of my self but I feel my loosing my work to the computer crash more keenly than I feel their losses.

That’s cause I’m me.

What should I do now?

Then I remembered the Prophet Jeremiah.

The word of the Lord came to him saying, “Take thee a roll of a book and write thererin all the words I have spoken unto thee…”

Jeremiah dictated to a scribe named Baruch who wrote a scroll 35 chapters long and sent the scroll to King Jehoiakim. (The Bible story of what happened is found in Jeremiah, chapter 36).

“Now the king sat in the winterhouse in the ninth month and there was a fire on the hearth burning before him”. As the long scroll was unrolled, the king took out a penknife and sliced off sections of the parchment as he read them and fed them into the fire.

I think this is the only place the Bible mentions a penknife. In ancient times writers sharpened quill writing pens with a small knife, hence the name. The penknife was also used to erase mistakes by scraping the lampblack ink off the surface of a velum skin.

Just thought you’d want to know.

Anyhow, the king fed every inch of Jeremiah’s manuscript scroll into the flames “until all the roll was consumed in the fire that was on the hearth”.

And Jeremiah did not have a backup disc.

Yet, “The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, after that the king had burned the roll… saying, ‘Take thee again another roll, and write in it all the former words that were in the first roll which Jehoiakim the king of Judah hath burned….

“Then took Jeremiah another roll… and wrote therein all the words of the book which Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire; and there were added besides unto them many like words”.

Yesterday, I spent hours trying to recover files from years of backup discs.

A daunting task.

Jeremiah’s story aside, I still wonder if it’s worth the effort.