Losing your data should be OK, right?

Beverly Beckham

Boston Globe

Last week I lost an entire year of pictures I took. Words I wrote. Music I recorded. Movies I made.

Before the specialist at the Apple Store did a factory reset on my hard drive, he checked my external drive. All the data that was supposed to have been saved on it was there.

But when it was time to transfer this data to the computer? The drive refused. It turned on. It vibrated. It looked forthcoming. But it wouldn’t give up the goods. I’m sorry, the technician said.

It could be worse, I told myself on the drive home. I could have lost all the pictures I’ve taken, all the slides I’ve scanned, all the old home movies, voice memo, e-mails, messages. I could have lost everything.

But I didn’t because I have an old external drive which held my digital life from 2002 right up until May 12, 2013. Birthdays. Holidays. Grandbabies born. Years and years of people I love, cheering, toasting, smiling, opening gifts, posing.

So I was lucky. Lucky the old drive worked. Lucky to have a backup. Lucky that all I lost was the one year I didn't back up.

Except that during the digitally lost year, my youngest grandson was born and baptized and smiled and rolled over and sat up and crawled and laughed and I was the one who took all the pictures.

Except that during that digitally lost year there were last-day-of-school pictures and first-day-of-school pictures and playing at the beach pictures and Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas and everybody’s birthday and concert and recital pictures.

Except that during that digitally lost year my husband retired and there were parties and speeches and toasts and pictures of friends we seldom see, smiling, happy. And I never printed them. And now they’re gone.

Except, and maybe I’m rationalizing here, maybe I’m just in need of a big silver lining, but isn’t it true that way back before we had digital lives, we still had lives? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If I live this whole day and no one takes my picture or records me, I’ve still lived, haven’t I?

I didn’t take a zillion pictures of my children when they were little. I don’t have every holiday we celebrated on film. I didn’t always carry a camera everywhere I went.

And yet, I remember.

I remember the Christmas Lauren was 3 and Santa brought her a wooden toy train set and she sobbed and said, “Santa must think I’m a boy!”

I remember the day my son sat me down on the living room couch and told me he was thinking about getting married. I didn’t take a picture. But I remember the look in his eyes.

I remember the Sunday afternoon my other daughter went into labor. We were in New York and walking down Broadway on our way to get Mexican food. She was wearing a black wool coat. The sky was gray. She stopped walking and bent over. “I don’t think I want Mexican food, Mom.” I never took a picture. I didn’t have to.

Pictures live in your head. I look at the calendar and see that on Feb. 7, 2014, I went to my granddaughter Charlotte’s school music recital. I remember going. I can picture Charlotte smiling at me.

And yet, I grieve the loss of the physical pictures I took that day, or the not physical ones, bytes and pixels and things I don’t understand but depend on, pictures that captured her smile and her friends’ smiles, then disappeared.

I’m lucky. I lost just a year. And I didn’t really lose it. I lived it, right? It happened. Pictures are just pictures. That’s what I keep telling myself. And that’s what I’m trying hard to believe.