A true* story about bit rot and backups.
*The following sequence of events has been modified to make it sound more deliberate and less random than it actually was.**
My mom grew up on a farm which no longer exists, but which I remember visiting as a child. A woman in her town painted a watercolor of the farm and sent Mom a JPEG of the watercolor. I got a copy of the file and printed it out and hung it up. The print is now washed out, so I have been thinking about making another.
I recently bought a really nice new color printer, so I’ve been looking for the file, and I couldn’t find it. I knew the file had come from my parents, but it wasn’t in any of several folders of pictures or backups of old computers that I could find. I’m a bit of a digital hoarder, but I have also learned about making backups the hard way, so I have lost quite a few memories to bit rot.
I do a short detour and do a search of my mail—I still use that account—and the email isn’t found. It was almost 20 years ago; I wonder a bit what the retention policy is for that account. Mom and Dad’s old ISP account is long gone, and Mom no longer has a computer, so I can’t ask her to send it to me again.
I still have a partial backup of my parents’ last computer, so I check it again for the picture of the farm. I had already done an Everything search, but maybe the file name is something more random? I backed up just two folders: “Pictures” and “Mail.” Lots of pictures, all from emails from their friends and family. A nice 8x10 of my brother’s AF official photo. He looked great in dress blues, so I snag that. No farm though.
Mail > [POP@mail.isp1.com] > Sent Messages.mbox > Messages is full of EMLX files, but the EMLX files are all 1 to 2 KB—tiny files. Attachments are listed but not included. No picture files here.
Mail > [Account@isp2.com] > Sent Messages.mbox > Messages has a handful of EMLX files, and a couple of them are over a MB. I start checking, and there it is. “Subject: farm picture”. A little farther down, “filename=P1020304.jpg.” After that is an inline code block in Base64.
I know what Base64 is, but I haven’t used Usenet in years. What do I have to convert it? …IrfanView pleads ignorance. Hmmm…. I do an Everything search for P1020304.jpg. No luck.
I end up downloading a free Base64 converter from the app store. It saves the file without asking me where I want to put it, so there’s another short Everything hunt for the file, and I find it a few levels deep in ~\AppData\ of all places, but it’s fine. I move it to my family pictures folder.
I print out the file on my new printer. It looks much better than the old faded print. I am happy.
** The actual sequence of events was more like:
- Look for the farm picture
- Give up
- Start organizing picture files a bit, as one does
- Look for more picture files in old backups
- (at this point I had forgotten the search and wasn’t even thinking about it)
- Go through the backup of my parents’ last computer
- (not really even looking for pictures at this point)
- Wonder if the EMLX files are readable as text files
- See that some of the files are really large?
- Open the first large file I find, spot the subject, and get a happy shock when I see it’s “farm picture”
- Be delighted I found the file without looking for it
- A little work converting Base64
- Make a nice print and hang it up
- A bit of thinking about other ways I could have retrieved the file now I know where it was
- Dreaming up a narrative about being thorough and finding the file by trying everything I can
