How I fucked up and learned from it

For a good chuck of my adult life, I’ve been the person that people go to when they’re having tech problems. My mom often needs a hand with parts of her job that need a bit of computer-y know-how. Friends come to me when they’re having some sort of problem. It’s something that brings me a lot of joy; I like helping people out, especially loved ones. However, I feel like there are times where I can probably come off as a bit impatient, because a lot of stuff that I think of as ‘basic’ is, well, not-so-basic to people who aren’t, in the words of Gravis Cathode Ray Dude, ‘computer touchers’.

One of the things I’ve gotten a bit high and mighty about is back-ups. I’ll often tell folks: “if it’s important, make a copy of it. Several if you can”. I’ve always prided myself of making copies of stuff on a consistent basis. My music library, video/movie/TV archive, and writing projects are all backed up and regularly kept up with on several different devices so if anything goes wrong, I can just copy them back over from one of my many sources. As a result, I often encourage folks to do the same. Matter of fact, you, person reading this: Got something on your computer or phone or whatever that’s important? Back it up. Now. Save yourself some trouble. It’s always a good idea. Copy stuff. Keep making copies. Make copies. Put them somewhere. Several places in fact. Got some hard drives? Put em on there. An SD card? Also good. A CD? Cool. Floppy Disk? Extra cool. ‘The Cloud’? No. Bad. Don’t do that. Fuck the cloud. That’s just a corporation’s computer. Do you trust Google? If you answered no, then please, if you can, put your stuff somewhere that isn’t Google Drive. Or OneDrive. Or whatever Apple’s equivalent is.

Anyway, back-ups. Yes. Important. Copies good. Mhm. I’ve been pretty good about sticking with it and taking my own advice, especially over the last several years. I can’t recall a time where I had any big issues due to data loss. The last time I can really remember that happening is some time in high school.

Well. Until yesterday.

I booted up my steam deck last night to watch a show on my boyfriend’s TV with it and I noticed that the main drive of the Deck was fine, but the Micro SD card I had a ton of my steam library and all of my emulated retro games installed to wasn’t showing up in the file viewer. I figured I just needed to eject it and put it back in, but NOPE. When I put the card back in, my Deck told me it needed to be formatted. Fuck. I rebooted the Deck. No change. I ran lsblk in the terminal to make sure the card was detected and then ran fsck to try fixing any errors with the SD card. Nope. Still no luck. Snake eyes. Critical failure. I could mount the card, but the contents were hidden. I grumbled about it, formatted the card, and moved on. It presumably still functions now that it’s been formatted, but that doesn’t change the fact that I, little Mx. Computer Toucher Who Always Backs Up Their Shit, did not back up my shit. My emulation library is totally gone and I have to start over from scratch.

Losing my emulation library isn’t a huge deal, but it’s a pain in the ass. The games aren’t hard to find. Losing my saves sucks a bit, but oh well. These are mostly old classics I’ve played a ton over the years and am happy to revisit.

No, what I take away from this most of all is that I’m a person and I’m prone to making mistakes and lapses in judgment. I’ve never thought of myself as particularly high and mighty or perfect, but I figured I would have had those old games backed up like I tend to tell people to do. Nope. Totally forgot. Slipped my mind. Never did it. I made a mistake just like we all do every day. Whatever. I can chalk it up as a learning experience. I’ll go out of my way to keep backing up my stuff, and to include my emulated games library in that process going forward. Confidence is cool and good, but I got cocky and it bit me in the ass. Lesson learned.

My point is that yes, you, reader, should definitely keep copies of stuff that matters to you. Sure, I only lost games this time, but it could have been something far more important. In a way, I’m glad that this happened. It got me thinking about my attitude toward other people and that I’m as prone to little fuck-ups as anyone else. I knew that, but it’s good to get that reminder. Hang on to the stuff that matters and remember that it’s okay to make mistakes but it’s even better to try to learn from those mistakes.

Thanks for reading this first blog post! I have no idea how frequently this thing will get updated. At the time of writing, it’s the first thing I’m actually posting here on my site. This could be the first of thousands of entries. It could be The One Post. Time will tell I guess!