Luckily, with even more than a trace.
Content is undoubtedly in the eyes of the beholder. But it can also be terribly
ephemeral - especially when a Save instead of a Save as ... causes
a rather well constructed page into cyber-limbo. Which is what happened to the
page that linked to this one.
The writing of this column has been even more drawn out than usual, with numerous
asides getting written without the main text actually going anywhere. Link after
link was clicked on, but the actually writing was more a sentence here and a sentence
there, rather than well-organized thoughts. It seemed that I'd even forgotten
where some of my tangents were intended to lead. And then I discovered that an
entire page was missing, saved over in a moment of distraction firmly located
in hours of apparently general confusion.
It seemed that no trace of the original page could be found, and depression was
quickly setting in. And then I remembered that Google Desktop Search has a cache
function, meaning that it not only indexes everything that I've written and saved,
but even earlier versions of those documents. It was worth a try. And sure enough,
three earlier version of the page in question were available to me, one of them
very close to being the last version that I'd prepared. And with only a bit more
than a minimum of copy and paste I was able to reconstruct the page, and give
thanks to computer programs that don't forget anything.
Go to: No room for content, or
Go to: It's
just too Oh!