Last month my laptop became unstable. I had been trying to do something which I began to regret. Losing patience I reinstalled the operating system. Unfortunately on my previous installation I had negligently chosen to set up my hard-drives as a striped array. This meant despite days of recovery attempts I lost everything. ‘Backup’ I hear you say. Yes I backed up… six years ago, on a hard drive that has now rusted to death. There is a few boxes of photos under the stairs in our Coffs house but all the digital photos that did not make it onto websites or cloud services are gone.

The buddhists will one day stop telling us, ‘nothing is permanent’. Despite this I am sad about losing the photos of my son when he was fresh born and all the other old pics I’ve not yet discovered missing.