It'll be fine
/You may have noticed that I was missing in action for the past two weeks. The reason is simple: my MacBook Pro self-immolated, and it is only now that I have gotten back on track after getting files retrieved and everything situated on the new MacBook.
It’s worse than it sounds. The old laptop was simply fried — my friends at Computer Advantage could “see” 800GB of files, but could not retrieve them. Neither could the crack team at Data Savers in Atlanta.
Ah, but Dale, you say, you had it all backed up, right?
Yeah, about that. We had a trusty Apple Time Machine, but it went belly up last fall before we headed to Maine for a jaunt, and you may imagine my astonishment when I discovered that no one makes a wifi backup server any more. Either you have to plug the thing into your laptop (clumsy when there are two machines to be backed up) or you have to use the cloud. I do not use the cloud.
So I dithered about solving the issue. Fortunately, the dead Time Machine was still sitting on my stairs, so I took that with me to Data Savers, and from there they were able to retrieve those files.
It’s taken me a week to get stuff back in shape, and I’m still hitting road bumps: Firefox doesn’t want to display this website reliably, for example, so I’ve had to switch back to Safari until I can figure it out.
All of that is prologue, however. What I really want to talk about is losing everything.
Until Data Savers emailed me to let me know they had been able to retrieve 99.99% of my data, there was the very real possibility that I had lost everything I have worked on for the last 40 years: music, writing, photos. I would have to rebuild my iTunes library and figure out which fonts I needed to find and restore.
All my burn work would have been gone: planning/info about my theme camp 3 Old Men, my placement database, my folder of quirky “It’ll be fine” memes, everything.
All my memorabilia: emails from friends, like the email from Nancy Willard telling me that of course I had her permission to set her Newbury–Award-winning A Visit to William Blake’s Inn to music.
And of course, all my files for the websites. The files for Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy. Lichtenbergianism for Kids. Any abortive attempts for music not published over at dalelyles.com. All would have been gone.
It was a very odd feeling, made even odder because I realized that I was going to be okay with it. Like the hero of the movie who walks calmly away from the exploding building, I was fully prepared to be done with that part of my life. It’s not as if the world is clamoring for William Blake’s Inn or Lichtenbergianism or any of it. (If they were, then it still wouldn’t have mattered since all those files would be in others’ hands anyway.)
I might have considered rebuilding the Alchemy placement database simply because I have one more burn to plan before handing that over to someone else, but even then I considered just walking away from that job as well.
As it turns out, I still have to keep at it, albeit without anything I created since Sep 2, 2019. Only of course I don’t: I can light a match to the fuse and walk confidently toward the camera at any time.
There’s something very freeing in that.
