I deleted synced documents from my phone to free up storage. Then disaster struck

One of my biggest fears happened the other day. The event that knocks us for a loop. I accidentally erased my hard drive from the iCloud.

Yes, my whole computer hard drive. Twenty plus years of class materials, research papers and articles, books, news columns, personal information. Gone. In the flick of a finger.

It started when my phone said it could not download some apps I’d used for years, because storage was overwhelmed. So I checked to see what took up so much space. Documents. They seemed to be from my computer (I have loads of documents from years of work. Now I know that I have (had) over 49,000 of them). So I deleted the documents file from my phone, figuring that, like emails, the original ones would remain on the computer.

Not so.

A day later, as I saved something on my hard drive, I noticed the normal file where I save such documents didn’t seem to be there. Then I realized that nothing I normally had was in its rightful spot. Wiped clean.

But I stayed completely calm, unlike my normal response, which would have been a scream that you could hear for miles.

Yes, I (on the surface) remained calm, and at first, I could not figure out why.

I have writer Pico Iyer to thank, I suspect. A travel writer, he did an online workshop with the Santa Fe Photography Workshops, a wonderful outfit in New Mexico that, during the pandemic, has traded in-person workshops for online programs. I’ve participated in a couple, and the latest was with Iyer.

He talked about the horrific fire that destroyed his California house several years ago. With it went four years of work on a book he had nearly finished. Devastating.

But over the subsequent months and years, he learned about the value of being forced to go back to the beginning (of writing a book), of being still (and not raging over something that can’t be changed), and of finding some opportunity in the disaster (harder for me at this point).

A miracle-worker IT expert has been able to recover some of my files, but it’s a jumble and will take me a year to go through the unlabeled thousands to find which I can use. I hope to find (some of) the documents I need and find ways to live without the ones I cannot find. What else can I do?

I also keep thinking that, in a world of pandemic and economic and so many other crises we face, my loss will not stop the world from turning. A good lesson, if hard. But here’s a better lesson for the rest of you: Watch what your fingers delete.

Nancy Napier is a Boise State University distinguished professor. nnapier@boisestate.edu. She is co-author of “The Bridge Generation of Vietnam: Spanning Wartime to Boomtime.”

This story was originally published March 17, 2021 at 11:43 AM.