entry14

[ironicbadger]

Simon Cowell Sob Story. Got it.

I have royally screwed up with irreplaceable data. I know this is a lot, but it all comes together in the end. I can show recipts, too, if anyone asks.

My wife and I got married in 2010 and were immediately moved to DC by the military. By 2012 and after the third miscarriage, we gave up on trying to have kids of our own, consoled by a conversation about how the world doesn't need more people anyways. Despite this, we still wanted to be parents and, in 2013, we were moved to Las Vegas and started foster parent classes.

It can't be overstated; foster care is hell for all involved. Often, the kids come out of one garbage situation only to be dropped right into another. We also tried to adopt every kid that we had the opportunity to, which led to several instances of having a kid we weened off of drugs from their first day of life being literally torn out of our hands as a toddler and handed back to the person who put them in that situation in the first place.

Despite that, for every terrible situation, there was one that made us happy to hand them off. One kid literally drove away in his uncle's Porsche after spending a week with us. That was shocking, since he entered the system after his abusive mother was arrested for trying to beat a random person on the street. His uncle didn't even know he existed and, when he found out about him, gave him a real "rags to riches" childhood turnaround.

Regardless of the end state, beautiful or horrifying, while they were in our house, they were our children. We intended to adopt every one possible and treated them as our own.

There were so many memories created over those years, and I can be quite the documentarian, though I was really frugal with the storage. I was actually kind of proud that I only accrued a couple terabytes over that timeframe, and that counts all the other stuff I generated, too. This was a necessary couple terabytes, as we weren't allowed to upload anything publicly and I never got a straight answer about whether or not I could even use cloud storage -- though I was pretty sure I could, I wasn't about to run the risk. This meant everything went on a JBOD array in my closet.

I left the military in 2017 and we moved back to our home state. In the move, some things got jostled. Out of SMART induced anxiety, I decided to consolidate everything down into one array of five one terabyte drives in zfs RAID 3. Thinking I was hunky dory, I tossed the old drives into my HDD graveyard. One SATA controller malfunction later, I found myself desperately digging through drawers, trying to recover anything at all. Some was recoverable, some was gone forever.

Birthdays, Christmases, vacations, tearful reunions. All gone. Kids we will never see again; kids that were our family for years have been erased completely. I still hold out hope that I can recover something off of that array, since it was God's filesystem, but I don't have a controller right now that can handle the 5+1 drives I'd need.

To this day, I'm gun shy. Everything is in multiple locations. Encryption keys are written on notebooks in different buildings. Pictures are printed. Despite it all, none of this will bring back what was lost. All I can do is ensure the future is remembered and protected appropriately.

Since I'm not made of money, keeping a backup strategy has been painful. I find myself deleting things that I wouldn't if I had more space. Ten terabytes would be enough to let me spread out and prioritize, instead of squeezing everything into a few drives over and over.