Photo of the Month (May 2025 Edition): The Nightmare

A ghost haunts all forms of digital art – the ghost of lost hard drives. One of the first texts on this blog was inspired by a nightmare that, fortunately, didn’t become reality. I dreamed that a volcano swallowed my backpack of photographic equipment, and in it was an external hard drive with all my photos. In fact, at that moment, I still needed to duplicate my backup files to avoid a total loss like that – and I’m glad I did it in time!

Along with the 8TB external disk acquired because of the nightmare (nicknamed Kurosawa) and used as the main backup, I continued using the same external HD supposedly swallowed by the volcano – a 4TB Lacie Rugged. It was purchased as an emergency at the end of 2022, because of another external HD that stopped working during a trip.

And so history repeats itself. First as a nightmare and now as a tragedy, because the final hour has come for the same Lacie bought to replace the old HD that decided to take advantage of the trip to retire. As announced, this current experience was a bit more traumatic than the nightmare and even more than replacing a generic HD with a Lacie Rugged.

Fresh back from a trip at the end of April, I finished transferring the photos from the camera to the Lacie. Before copying them to Kurosawa, for some illogical reason, I formatted the camera’s memory cards. And here I could prove the maxim “whoever has two has one, whoever has one has nothing.” When I reconnected the Lacie to the computer to copy the photos to Kurosawa, I opened the file explorer, selected the folders, hit the magic ctrl+c and voilà… the file explorer closed, and the Lacie disappeared from the computer.

I reconnected the USB cable and nothing happened, except for the orange light blinking on the external HD. I tried to force recognition of the drive and nothing. I repeated the procedure several times until testing the HD and confirming it was corrupted. I kept calm for a while, since Kurosawa was intact and there were no major losses – except for the photos from that last trip.

But losing the photos from that last trip didn’t seem reasonable to me at all. I lost my calm. I tried using various programs to specifically recover the last photos, but without success. It was two sleepless nights trying to get those photos back – much worse than a nightmare that, at least, featured a volcano. Losing photos like this, in such a less exciting (and more stupid) way than having them swallowed by a volcano was horrible.

With my hopes of solving the problem with my own hands exhausted, I sent the corrupted Lacie to a company specialized in data recovery. After a week from the incident, and paying the price of another trip, the company returns to me an external SSD with the photos I wanted to recover and the corrupted Lacie, now stored as a memento in the electronic waste pile.

Throughout all the time I fought not to lose the photos, I never stopped remembering that volcano nightmare – the natural phenomenon that’s at the top of what I most want to photograph. As I wrote in that text, the nightmare seemed to take place in an environment from the film “Dreams” by Akira Kurosawa, known for its exceptional photography and marked by the rainbow in the final scene of the first part. Therefore, among the almost-lost photos, I choose a small rainbow on the high seas as the photo of the month.