Time to recreate family history

I went looking for some family history the other night.

But I couldn't find it.

For years, I have been a Mac user. And I've been pretty shameless about boasting about Apple's superiority when it comes to computer stability.

There's been plenty to boast about, but I had grown complacent.

So an incident a few weeks back was probably inevitable.

We'd been out of town and had left the iMac in my study on in our absence. That's pretty much standard operating procedure at our house.

But this time, when we came home, the screen saver was frozen. Nothing responded. I powered down and powered back up, doing a "safe boot," but the machine didn't respond. It couldn't find the system software to get itself up and going.

There were essentially two choices: The system software had become corrupt or the hard drive had failed.

I hoped for the former, but wasn't surprised when Phil, one of our Mac guys, told me it was the latter.

And there was worse news. No matter how hard he tried, no matter which recovery software in his vast arsenal he used, he was unable to rescue any of the data on the drive.

At that point, my complacency was looking like idiocy.

Oh, sure, there were some things we'd been faithful about backing up.

But, inevitably, there were others we'd been casual about, seduced by the stability and consistency of a computer that had run without fail for something like six or seven years.

That's where the family history comes in.

Going all the way back to our first home computer - a venerable Tandy from Strohl's - we've maintained a living document called "The Timeline."

It's a running account of our lives together, dating back to 1968 when Connie and I met. The writing is fragmentary, and for the early years the entries are pretty short.

Some of the events chronicled there are momentous (births and deaths, illnesses and celebrations). Some are trivial (re-siding the house, flat tires on vacation).

But taken all together it's a pretty rich soup. Every member of the family has contributed to it at one time or another.

But did I think to make a back-up? Apparently not. I've been checking thumb-drives. I've checked to see if I e-mailed it to myself at work. I remember there being a hard copy, but I haven't been able to resurrect it yet.

There is one other possibility. An earlier iMac is still hanging around that would have about three-quarters of the document on it. The only question then would be how to get it out of that computer into a new one that's probably not compatible.

We'll figure out a way.

Even the worst case scenario could be fun. We'll just start at the beginning and write it all over again: "It was April 7, 1968, the day after downtown Richmond exploded and only a few days after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. ..."[[In-content Ad]]