The night the drive clicked

Late on a January night the external drive holding a whole research trip's worth of D5 photographs began to click like a beetle trapped in a matchbox. Then it unmounted itself with the calm of someone leaving a party early. One folder had not yet been copied to the second drive. I sat very still, as if stillness might persuade hardware to reconsider its choices.

What followed was an hour of careful, slightly superstitious work. The MacBook balanced on a kitchen chair for reasons that made sense only in the moment. Cables held at specific angles like makeshift antennae. I did not thump the drive. I did not bargain out loud, though I came close.

On the last attempt it mounted long enough for the missing folder to cross the wire, file by file, while I watched the progress bar the way one watches a kettle in a power cut. Outside the fog had taken the courtyard down to the nearest lamp, and even that was guesswork.

The drive has since been retired with something like military honors to a drawer I do not open casually. On a sticky note beside the monitor I wrote the new rule: nothing exists until it exists twice. I back up now with the zeal of the recently frightened, which is to say thoroughly, repeatedly, and without trusting yesterday's confidence. Fear, it turns out, is an excellent archivist when you let it draft the protocol.