It is at times like these that I am glad to be a Calvinist–it is so comforting. Most people don’t understand this–they think that to believe that the Lord knows and controls the future means that they are chained to fate. It’s not that way. From our side, we see our free will. From the Lord’s, though, outside of time and space, he can see and touch our futures in a way we can only imagine. So it’s comforting. He knows and cares whether or not I win the item I want. It’s nice to think sometimes in the uncertainty that the choice or outcome we worry about is a known fact in the future–and God knows. It is comforting to have a full view of God’s sovereignty in a situation like this–like when you get outbid at 24 seconds to go.

Game over. You didn’t win. But the Lord knows, and he may also know if that computer was a lemon, the seller would cheat you, or just that you ought to buy something else. It’s far from being restricting–it’s freeing to know that the King of all Kings, the Creator of Time and Space, the Owner of the cattle on a thousand hills, has my well-being in mind–I don’t have to worry.

In His Service,
John Calvin Young

And here comes the bad news: when I started looking around for backups, the latest I had was a February 14th backup–and it was incomplete. To save time, I had not backed up ANY of my film footage or masters. I have the only extant masters of seven separate short films on that drive (four of them mine) including three San Antonio semi-finalists. Obviously, I’m about to come unglued over it–I don’t know why the Lord is putting me through this, but I’m having to pray for faith to deal with all this a lot right now. I have been researching recovery options, and I understand that a recovery service can in some types of hardware failure open up a drive in a cleanroom and swap the platters to another drive to pull the data off, just as long as it’s not too badly damaged. The only thing is that that sort of service STARTS at $600 PER DRIVE, and I just don’t have that sort of money at the moment. Something strange–both drives–from different manufacturers, one used at least 4–6 months longer than the other, with very different usage patterns–failed within 12 hours of each other with a physical hard drive crash.

Anyrate, I could really use some prayer. I have the drives on ice (literally, but don’t worry, they’re sealed up) and I’m praying that they will stay stable until I can check out the options for possibly getting them recovered in the future. As it is, it’s only the Lord’s mercy that I have as much of it as I do backed up–I was rather remiss with backups, needless to say, and I only backed that 10GB up because I thought I had a virus in February. So if y’all can pray that we have the faith to deal with this and start reconstructing everything on those drives (it wasn’t just video, it was the main family computer for four years)… And if anybody knows anything about hard drive recovery…well, I’d be glad to hear something. Pretty stressed right now…

In His Service,
John Calvin