I severed ties with my family’s iCloud account so I could have sole control over, and sole responsibility for, any repeat event of this nature.īut like finishing a really good book and not wanting to dive straight into a new read, I couldn’t face the blank canvas of the app in the days that followed. After exhausting all options of retrieving my lost notes, including downloading questionable iPhone rescue software, I immediately backed everything up, twice. While gut wrenching, this experience has been a come-to-Jesus moment. We fear losing hard drives that store years’ worth of photos (how many back-ups of back-ups is it realistic to do?) or travel journals that are irreplaceable. Whether or not it is a generational thing, everyone has a time capsule they couldn’t bear to lose, digital or otherwise. To anyone that doesn’t, the question “You don’t back up?” is somehow still infuriating. Surely you can’t use notes that much? What about good old pen and paper? But like Carrie’s laptop dying in Sex and the City, or Amy burning Jo’s manuscript in Little Women, my collection of seemingly insignificant moments mattered like a magnum opus. It may be hard for some to grasp the gravity of the situation. Another friend immediately replied to my panicked texts with expletives in all caps. She likened reading some back as far as 2017 to reliving the person she used to be. One friend pulled out her phone unprompted, opened her notes app and read out a stream of inane thoughts she had written down, many of which had no meaning any more. Some instantly understood my grief at this loss. Everyone has a time capsule they couldn’t bear to lose, digital or otherwise But I can’t ever revisit exactly what I wrote, or exactly when it was. There were also the good things: kids in dinosaur pyjamas eating croissants by the beach early in the morning because their parents weren’t rushing to work and just how nice that was. When a couple in the supermarket were trying to decide whether or not to panic-buy pasta and tinned tomatoes like everyone else, I wrote down what they said. Perhaps most tragically, there were observations on the first year of Covid, when daily life completely changed. Yes, there were shopping lists, but there was also far-flung ideas for a book I could write one day and comments overheard while people-watching. These recorded moments were seemingly insignificant and occasionally important. To the astonishment of my father, the app also contained several passwords. I wrote down the questions I was asked in my job interview so I could remember what caught me off guard. There would have been a drafts of important text messages in there somewhere, right next to a list of rentals I’d inspected and why almost all of them were bad. PHONE APP DISAPPEARED IPHONE MOVIEThere were movie recommendations, books to read and restaurants to try. It housed everything from drafts of Christmas cards to an itinerary for a recent trip to Melbourne to the speech I wrote for my best friend’s university graduation on Zoom.
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