The Five Stages of Data-Loss Grief

What to expect when all of your photos, files and music are gone forever

So your hard drive just died, and you didn't back it up. I'm so, so sorry. You can expect to go through the following five stages once you discover that all of your photos, files and music are gone forever.

Stage One: Denial

"No. No, there's no way. This is probably just a software issue; maybe if I try rebooting again it'll work. I've only had this hard drive for two years, there's no way it just died. I'll get all that stuff back. This silly computer always freaks out but is fine after a reboot. Even though I've tried rebooting five times and it sounds like a fork is stuck in a garbage disposal in there, it's probably just the CD drive."

Stage Two: Anger

"Are you kidding me? I've lost everything! And what the heck is wrong with me? Why didn't back this stuff up? I'm so careless I just want to pretend this is a bad dream. I hate that this happened. I really don't deserve it."

Stage Three: Bargaining

"OK, so maybe I can download some software and boot this drive as a secondary drive and try to recover some stuff. I mean, I'll have to go buy a new hard drive and install it and then figure out how to hook this one up as a secondary drive, and I'm not sure where my OS discs are, but hey, I'm a smart guy, I can figure this stuff out, right? Or maybe professional data recovery services have gotten much, much cheaper lately. Yeah, I'll bet they're affordable now, they've gotta be."

Stage Four: Depression

"All those photos. I'll never, ever get them back. I'll never see those faces again. And my essays from college, I was going to share those with my kids someday. And man, all that music, it's taken me years to collect all that. Why did I even bother? It's like the last ten years of my life have just been erased."

Stage Five: Acceptance

"Ah, none of that stuff was that important. Most of it was uploaded to various sites anyways, at least the really important stuff. Re-gathering all that music will be fun, too! And hey, you know what? Maybe it's good to start fresh every once in a while. And man, hard drives have gotten a lot cheaper since I last bought one. This is really just a good way to put things in perspective; none of this stuff was all that important. Except for those photos of my kids. Why the heck didn't I back them up?"

By Adam Frucci