A friend called me last spring, about an hour after her laptop stopped turning on. She wasn't panicking about the laptop. She was panicking about a folder called `taxes_current`, and about eleven year...

A friend of mine lost eleven years of photographs on an ordinary Tuesday. Not to a hacker, not to a fire — to a laptop that simply refused to wake up. She had been meaning to "sort out backups" for ab...

There's a specific kind of silence that follows a hard drive dying. You press the power button again. You unplug it, wait, plug it back in. You Google the exact clicking sound it just made, already kn...
