Bona Dea, what a night.
As I was sitting down to begin my producing/moderation duties in regards to the Heathen Talk podcast (Wednesday Nights at 10pm Eastern), I stumbled upon a distracting and horrific realization. The folder which all of my Pagan topics, from my blog, to other ideas for initiatives, to .pdf downloads that I have found in regards to my interests in the wider community and my own practice was missing. Entirely from my harddrive. Half completed, mostly completed, and just started writings are missing, including pieces for the Roman Revivalism and Spiral Nature blogs.
Understand, I am not computer illiterate. While I am by no means a programmer (indeed, I struggle with a lot of code), I am a high functioning user of many personal computer systems and tend to take to program usage very well. So how an oversight could have happened, how I could have mistakenly deleted an entire folder titled “BLOG TOPIC IDEAS” escapes me entirely. The only thing that I believe happened was that I was moving a lot of files around and accidentally deleted it to the recycle bin.
Unfortunately, I also cleared my recycle bin out, late last week while I was visiting family. Oops.
Now, I am aware that there are programs out there which can potentially recover lost information. Windows, especially, has a tendency to not delete files for a little while, and simply assigns the information as blank so it is marked for later overwriting. But in this case, time is usually of the essence. While there were some organizational ideas, stories, and electronic scribbles of a Pagan nature that I lament losing, I’ve thought about it and decided that the energy it would take to try to recover these files wouldn’t necessarily be well spent in this regard.
Instead, I’m going to approach this as a chance for a clean slate of topical ideas without being burdened down with any of the thoughts or viewpoints which I had accumulated in this folder for the past two and a half or more years. Nothing I had in this folder is irreplaceable, provided I have the same confluence of inspiration and incentive to think along those paths again.
I’m more embarrassed that it happened to begin with, than anything else.
Things have been slow here because I have been distracted with other things, trying to get my life in order. And I’ve been mentally strained in terms of creativity for anything. Head weasels, as they’re popularly called, yanno?
Nothing is on hold, but I’m going to take this action as a way to do a solid reset on my blogging state and start everything over again for freshness. Attack things from different angles. Stop procrastinating other projects. And just move forward.
“Let accidents happen to such as are liable to the impression, and those that feel misfortune may complain of it, if they please. As for me, let what will come, I can receive no damage by it, unless I think it a calamity; and it is in my power to think it none, if I have a mind to it.” – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, VII.14
Thanks for reading.
Of Axe and Plough 
I’ve had this happen before and took it far less well than you. I’m sad/sorry to see it happen to anyone, but I am looking forward to your writing.
Thanks! I tend to procrastinate really bad at finishing up/starting new works, but thankfully the almost-finished works were few and far between. It’s more the handy repository of ideas, and some organizational stuff that hurts.
As I tell my customers daily, “think of backups like seat belts, we always wear them because we never know what might happen.”
Ack! As I’ve begun putting together a similar folder in the last year or so, I understand the heart attack that this might bring. I always say that any situation is always in the eye of the holder so if you change your perspective, you change the situation. A fresh start can be very freeing.
If it makes you feel any better, about a year and a half ago something with a bad flash drive happened when I was transferring data from one computer to another such that it everything on my desktop and it up in my trash. Which I didn’t know then (but I know now) everything gets removed from its folder when it goes in the trash. And so every single one of the files on my computer became un-filed. All of them. And I’m kicking myself at my lack of a set file naming conventions. But I have come to find which files/articles/artwork, etc, are important to me, and which are not.
(Apparently you can’t edit comments on an iPhone, my apologies for the typos.)