The moment my digital life ended.

One November day… 6:24 PM, the gentle autumn evening had started off well. My son, breaking from his habits, decided to tidy up the family desk a bit (to set up his game console). Unfortunately for him, with an unfortunate elbow movement, he knocked down my little portable hard drive… the very one that contains my entire digital life: family photos and videos, my scanned and organized administrative documents, my reports and work files… in short, countless hours of work and memories all jumbled together.

You can guess what happened next, and after a brief moment of frustration, I plug in my drive to check its condition… click, click, click… the sound is unusual… click, click, click… no icon appears… click, click, clack… the verdict is final: drive not accessible!

Stress rises, but fortunately two precautions are better than one. I take out from my closet, safely stored away from light, my backup Blu-rays and start copying them onto my computer…
… 37,248 files to copy, this is going to take a while…

… oops… it’s been a long time since I last made a backup…
… 37,228 files left to copy…
… all our summer photos and the year-end holiday ones will be missing…
… 37,217 files left to copy…
… I think it’s time for a little break, I’ll come back in an hour…

…
… 4,315 files remaining… but why is it stuck?!!!???!!!
… Defective sector?!!!!???!!#$@$$× is this a joke!
No scratches, just a few fingerprints, I take out my microfiber cloth and try again…
… the result is no better…

Me, an IT guy, losing data… impossible! This time I grab my screwdriver and go back to the assault on the little suffering hard drive. I take apart the casing, replace it with another one previously tested… same result!
A few days pass and the search for a solution slowly fades away.
After running several miracle tools with no effect, I must face the truth…

The diagnosis: an unrecoverable hard drive, the only solution being a clean-room disassembly. Despite an unattractive starting price of a few hundred of euros, the cost of the operation for my drive will be even higher, not reimbursed by social security of course!
Yes, it hurts… after a few days of testing and tinkering, I give in.

After all, I’ve already invested a lot in a camcorder, camera, and scanner… All that for nothing?
I have trouble accepting it.
But at this point, do I have any other choice? To hell with stinginess, I break open my piggy bank and reinvest directly in my memories.
Not to mention my list of favorite music and videos, which represents a significant amount accumulated over the years.
I finally entrust the drive to the postal service, crossing my fingers that it won’t be lost forever… I’m finding it harder and harder to trust… after a few days I finally receive a stack of Blu-rays containing a good part of my precious files.
The report confirms that there are some defective sectors and that extracting them will simply be impossible, but at least the bulk of the files are there.

I still have some paper originals to rescan. They’re wrinkled, yellowed, imperfect… But suddenly, they feel like treasures.

In short, I remain convinced that digitizing documents is still a good solution. Storage media keep evolving — between audio cassettes, vinyl, VHS, Mini DV… digital remains the future. But our backup media are a bit too fragile, and I’m certainly not going to carve my documents onto a stone tablet.

Digital is the future, yes. But storage media? Too fragile, too unpredictable. I’m not about to engrave my spreadsheets on stone tablets, but I’ve learned my lesson.

USB sticks disappear, SSDs die silently, clouds go offline without warning. So I decide to go further — to rethink everything. If disasters are inevitable, then preparation must be too.

Never admitting defeat, I gather my courage and decide to go further. Faced with this kind of disaster, you simply have to be prepared and take into account all types of risks: deterioration, loss, theft, fire, flooding, and why not a cyclone?

And so begins my deep dive into the world of backups, redundancy, and long-term preservation. A journey I should have started long ago.