I consider myself to be something of a digital hoarder. Every time I have to delete any file I do a double-check, and formatting drives gives me anxiety.
There is this fear inside me that if I delete something important, I’ll regret it later. The thought of my precious data going away into the void of the recycle bin haunts me.
This fear has featured a lot in my childhood.
The Sony Camcorder
When I was born, my baba decided to buy a Sony Handycam. This was a huge purchase for him, costing ₹25,000 in 2004. That’s about ₹87,000 adjusted for inflation today.
This was a Handycam DCR-TRV460E. It records on either a memory card, or a cassette.
This camera has a lot of nostalgic value for me. Most of my early childhood has been recorded, at 480p, on this thing, and all of it is on 8mm cassette tapes.
These tapes couldn’t hold more than 60 minutes of video (90 minutes if you were fine with a lower quality), so we ended up having a small box of these at home.
This had the issue of making the tapes very vulnerable to my childhood antics. Like any curious toddler, I enjoyed ripping the tape out of the cassette and playing with it. This has probably destroyed hours of video that my parents recorded.
Some of that video was going to be destroyed anyways. My baba often recorded new video over older tape, deleting the original contents.
By the year 2010, we had a digital point-and-shoot camera. Baba had put the camcorder up in the loft. The cassettes lay in a box in a storage cabinet. Both forgotten.
I found those tapes one day, and asked my baba if we could play them on the camcorder. We took the camcorder out of its old dusty bag. Its cassette bay open and it played a cute little chime as a servo motor triggered inside and brought out the holder for us to put in our cassette. My baba inserted the cassette and clicked the holder in place. The motor whirred again and the cassette slowly slid into the body of the camcorder.
He liked doing these kinds of things with me. Baba always supported my interest in anything, especially if he could help me experience it. This was another such day. We sat there with excitement. I didn’t understand how to use the camera, but baba gladly showed me how it worked.
Baba flipped the camera’s display open and went into playback mode. The read head motor whined its way to full speed as I watched in awe at this amazingly complex piece of technology got ready to show me my childhood. And nothing happened. The camera refused to play the tape. Baba fiddled around with the camera for a bit but gave up after a while.
This is the first time I remember feeling that dread. A part of my childhood was lost.
A bunch of CDs on a rack
Thankfully, baba had converted most of our tapes to CDs. These sat in a cupboard in our extra bedroom, neatly stacked inside a plastic cylinder.
My parents always believed in exposing me to new technologies. At the age of 4, I knew how to use our family computer and use dial-up to connect to the internet and play flash games.
Our family computer had a DVD drive too. My mom used to put in a pirated copy of Stuart Little 2 for me as I sat in a wooden chair that was too big for me and laughed as the little mouse talked to people.
Apart from this, sometime in the late 2000s, we also got a Philips DVD player for our TV. I remember asking my mom if we could watch videos from my childhood. A fancy-dress competition. Me playing pretend shopkeep with my grandma. Or maybe it was some random family function that baba had decided to record.
A favorite CD of mine was a Tenali Raman cartoon made for kids. I don’t remember what it was about at all, except that the character Tenali Raman was in it. One afternoon, I asked my mom if I could play it on our computer (I was never very fond of the TV). She said yes, and I gladly ran across the living room to fetch the CD. I’d gotten used to the process now. Get the rack of CDs, flip through them while sitting on the bed trying to find the one I wanted to play. I took my time admiring the vibrant rainbows on the back of the CDs while I did this.
I found the Tenali Raman CD I was looking for, and taking care not to touch the shiny side, I gently put my index finger. Holding a CD like that always made me feel like I was lord Vishnu wielding the sudarshan chakra. I headed over to the family computer.
Our computer was old. A less patient person might have replaced it because of its annoying (but still somehow sweet, and now nostalgic) quirks. The CD drive was especially quirky. It had an eject button, but something had gone wrong inside the tray mechanism one day and it never worked since. One had to push the end of a straightened paperclip into a small circular slot beside the button for the eject mechanism to trigger. There was a certain kind of finesse that this maneuver required that I had perfected over the years.
With my Tenali Raman CD in my hand, I expertly performed the same maneuver with the paperclip and ejected the tray. I loaded my CD into the computer, got into the wooden chair that was still a bit too big and waited for it to get detected. The CD drive made a distinctive noise which reassured me that it was working. The familiar splash screen of Nero opened up on the screen.
I was happy. For the next half an hour, I would be entertained watching Tenali Raman do whatever it is that he does. The intro movie played. And disaster struck. The video player wasn’t able to read the disc any further.
I took out the disc to inspect it. Flipped it over to the shiny side. Scratch. A long mark right across the disc. In denial, I tried playing the disc again and again, but it always stopped at the same place, the image of Tenali Raman staring at me with an error window popping open.
Defeated, I went to put the CD back into the rack, in the same place as the videos of my childhood.
Old hard drives and Digital Cameras
Before college, I used to spend a lot of my summertime days at my grandma’s. It’s a quaint little family home built by my grandpa. My grandma lives there today with the families of my 2 uncles.
On just another quiet summer day, I was rummaging around the storage room on the terrace of that house. The room itself was dusty, and a mess of different things from various eras. A pair of copper brass cooking pots from before I was born. A CRT monitor from the early 2000s. And another box that caught my eye.
It was a stack of old hard drives. Makes sense, my uncle owned a computer shop at the time. They were mostly unusable - some as small as a couple of GBs. Some had connectors I had never seen. Among that stack I noticed one drive with a SATA connector, something I knew I could plug into my computer back home.
I asked my uncle if I could take it back with me, and he said yes, probably just to humor me. I was happy. With the drive in my hands, I walked back home, excited to show my mom the haul I had gotten back from my adventures to grandma’s storage room.
With the same excitement, I opened up my computer and plugged the drive in, and turned on the power. The CPU fan started up. The two hard drives spun to life. The monitor lit up with the ASUS logo.
I was glad to have my hands on an upgrade, even though the drive was a tiny 80 GB one. As an 8th grader I didn’t have much say in what we bought. This meant that my dad won’t let me buy all the fancy tech that I wanted.
I installed a random operating software on it that I can’t recall the name of. It was fun for a few days. A few weeks later, I started my computer like every other day but this time I didn’t see the familiar loading screen. What I saw was a SMART error.
This was the first time I got to know about the deterioration of HDDs. The internet told me that dying hard drives usually make a clicking sound, something I’d noticed when I first plugged in the drive and shrugged away as just random noises.
We had always used our home computer as a dump for any photos that we took on our vacations with our new digital camera. This couldn’t be avoided, the memory card in the camera could only hold a few week’s worth of travel pictures at a time.
Reading that the average hard drive lived about 3 to 5 years made me anxious about the drive in my computer, which was at the time about to cross 8 years of life. This drive that contained all my favorite photos with my parents and friends.
Google Drive
I got a phone for myself in 2021, just as I joined college. Before this I’d been limited to using my parents’ phones to take photos, which I usually just did when we had to take a group photo. After all we still had the digital camera for our vacations.
With a phone just for me, I started taking more photos. Sometimes it’d just be random pigeons sitting in my balcony. Sometimes it was a slo-mo video of some smoke off an incense stick.
As I settled into college life in Goa, this became photos of me and my friends. Sometimes it’d be cats lazing around. Maybe we’d taken really good pictures at the beach for someone’s Bumble profile. Most of the times it was just stupid faces we made. I love all of these pictures.
Some time during all of this, I somehow signed myself up for Google Photos. This backed up all my photos to my Google Drive, which gives me 15 GB of storage on the cloud, across all my devices.
This has run out.
Google has also introduced a policy change, and now WhatsApp backups count towards Drive storage too.
Now I have a choice to make. Delete these photos forever, or pay a subscription fee forever to keep them with me.
It’s a choice I am dealing with right now.
What is this even about?
I’m writing this post as a way to deal with this choice.
The fear that I keep referencing is not really a fear of loss of data. It’s about forgetting things.
With the ease of photography and videography today, it’s common to record lots of stuff. I have this habit too. I want to record everything I am a part of, I want to relive it in the future at will.
But I have to deal with the fact that I may never do that. Do my memories only mean something to me if I can relive them later? Obviously no. I love them for the experiences that they were. That’s what makes them special.
Today I’m much more informed on data storage. I know what I’m doing wrong. I know that I’m supposed to have an off-site backup for my most important data (hell, I don’t even have an on-site backup). I know that I should run drives in RAID to account for drive failure. I know about the bit rot of CDs and magnetic tapes. I know that I shouldn’t be keeping all my data on a 14 year old HDD.
And yet I still do it.
Because today I know, it’s fine to forget.