Dear Curating, The glitching laptop is a rude awakening, not unlike a brush with death. One day you're blithely opening and saving files as though the device and everything it contained were immortal; the next, the contents of your hard drive are flashing before your eyes-wedding photos, videos of your kids, novels or dissertations in various stages of completion-and you see, with sudden clarity, the headlong folly of storing so many invaluable items in one place. I'm not being facetious. Not entirely. To watch all that information disappear, in one fell swoop, would be devastating, similar to losing all your possessions in a fire or flood, acts of God that have, at least, the compensatory benefit of endowing the victim with an aura of cosmic tragedy. The saga of a dead hard drive, on the other hand, is so commonplace, so lacking in tragic vision, that it's unlikely to garner more than a few performative murmurs of condolence, along with the inevitable question: "You didn't have backups?"
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