Letting things go

[gement]

Last winter, a little over a year ago, I tried to log into my hotmail and discovered it had been just three days over the limit for deleting all my messages.

That would be all my messages since I first got it as my first email account in 1996. Including the one from Scott Adams of Dilbert, which said that my interest in Karate would probably help me in my Physics degree (a cogent response to what I had actually sent him). Also including the bulk of correspondence from an online relationship with a man in London, and a number of other things. Y'know. Stuff.

So that reminded me that I still hadn't figured out how to get my mail out of my UW grad school account, since I was no longer a student and I recalled from my undergrad that there was a time limit before they deleted everything. I tried several times to figure out how, including emailing the help desk, and kept getting told that it was basically impossible. I left it for a couple weeks in frustration before calling the help desk to find out how it should be done. After all, if they made it impossible to get your mail out, they wouldn't just delete it, right?

Three days after the purge. Including the final drafts of most of my school assignments, all of my grad school contacts that I might want to keep in contact with professionally, and a number of things that I never really read but kept in email because it was searchable, and if I ever needed to find it I knew it would be there.

So I came home to Jason in tears. He said, "Are there any other accounts you should back up, so this can't happen again?" I said, "Just ravensanctuary, and Cow takes care of that. It'll be fine, no auto-purges and he keeps backups and stuff."

Cow transfered servers this summer, and I was surprised to find my archives had disappeared. He said they shouldn't have, I said they had, and could he please look for them, and dropped the subject.

I got email from him yesterday.

The disks I got back from the server were completely unusable, and I
wasn't able to get anything off of them. If it makes you feel any
better, with the exception of a couple small specific backups, I've
lost all the mail from my UW account and from my old, non-gmail
accounts, which means pretty much everything from 2000 to 2007. :(

That's three jobs, my time in my hometown and Seattle between college and college, several relationships and housemate negotiations and landlord communications and letters from, well, everyone...

I'm trying to feel Buddhist about this, really I am. I'm not losing the relationships. I'm losing the ability to look up a few possibly useful facts down the road, or to look up people if they sent me email once and I can remember how to search for it. I'm losing the ability to skim years back and see if there are people I'd like to talk to again, and really, the chances of my doing that are not very high, much as I like to think of it as something I'd like to do.

It still feels like a strange abstract kind of dying, like a house fire and losing all your photo albums, even if you never opened them.

I thought I'd dealt with this all last year. I remember thinking, "even if I lost that last account, I think I could take it now." ... I'm not crying this time. I have practice at it, I suppose. But this really hurts.

As with last time, I will probably cope by repotting my plants.

Comments

[tithonium.livejournal.com]

Not sure if it's better or worse to lose it through your own fault or others'. I lost nearly all of my, what was it, 2003? email because my wonderful little auto-archiving script that I wrote moved all the emails out of the main folders and into the archive folders... which did not exist.

*hug* I'm sorry for your loss.

[gement.livejournal.com]

This still feels like my fault, because in all three cases my procrastination (my greatest bane) was a major factor. It turned out in all three cases that I could have made back-ups (and meant to, though in the first two accounts, I didn't have the technical savvy to find out how - I actually wrote to hotmail 3 times asking how, and then the day after I discovered my loss, someone said, "oh, you just...")

... Thanks.

Having written the script myself would have added an extra sting to it, though, yes. I'm sorry for your loss as well.

[capnexposition.livejournal.com]

Aw, hon. I am so sorry. You know how I feel about the tangible remnants of the past, but I have to say this is a seriously unfortunate series of events. I probably still have some old correspondance with you floating around. Do you want me to dig through my old email stuff for any communications from you/to you? I can forward you what I have if it's stuff you wanted. My sympathies.

[gement.livejournal.com]

Thank you. That is incredibly kind. If you could make a low-effort search for my name or email address, and forward a few of the tasty ones, I'd appreciate it.

By the way, I have your books and must return them.

[corivax.livejournal.com]

I checked my own (small) archives but did not turn up anything interesting. I am sorry you have gremlins.

[cy4cypher.livejournal.com]

If it's not trite: I understand what you're saying. That would be really hard. Big hugs!

[mathochist.livejournal.com]

Damn. I'd be traumatized by that too. I hope gmail is safe... maybe I should figure out a way to archive it, just in case.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Having suffered several catastrophic, data disasters, I am completely sympathetic with your pain. It is indeed traumatic.
Its like body part loss, or amnesia.
*hugs you*