On Friday I remembered, as I do from time to time, that several years back I bought e-book editions of Diane Duane’s Young Wizards books direct from her website. Because they weren’t bought through Amazon and the “Send to Kindle” feature didn’t exist at that time, I sideloaded them onto my Kindle, which meant they didn’t end up in my Kindle cloud with most of my other ebooks. Several Kindles later, I had no idea where the files were or if I even still had copies. I’d been putting off looking for them for a while now, because I had the feeling it would be an irritating project and I would only end up annoyed with myself if I’d managed to lose them. But around 11:00 on Friday night, I decided to dig in.
Step one was to see if I’d copied them onto the external hard drive I keep in my bedside drawer. I discovered that the manufacturer of this hard drive has apparently not updated its drivers for whatever release of Windows I have on my laptop; my machine recognizes what kind of device it is but won’t let me view the contents in File Explorer. So that was out.
Steps two and three were to see if the two old laptops sitting on a shelf in the hall closet (1) still worked and (2) had anything promising. I started with what I thought was the older one, an Asus model. It turned on relatively smoothly, but I couldn’t come up with the Microsoft password it wanted; because it had been offline it wanted the password I used at the time, and I tried eight or ten of my old passwords with no luck.
I then switched to the newer machine, a Toshiba with a cracked screen (I believe I stepped on it). On this one the Microsoft password reset option was working, and fortunately my old Microsoft account is still linked to my current phone number, so I was able to get into my desktop. Unfortunately, after a couple minutes dealing with its appalling trackpad I determined that there were no e-book files in the Documents or Downloads folders; everything on that machine was a little too new.
I switched back to the older laptop. I tried getting in on my mother’s account, figuring I might be able to get into my documents via File Explorer from her profile. And one of her old passwords did work. File Explorer wanted an admin password to get into my documents, but after thinking about it for several suspenseful minutes it decided it was happy with the new Microsoft password I had just set on the other laptop. And there, inside a “Stuff from Old Laptop” folder within My Documents, was another folder named “Owned Ebooks,” with a “Young Wizards” folder inside that. The question now was, how to get them off this relic and onto a current device
If it was just the Young Wizards books I could have emailed them to myself. But there were a bunch of other e-books I didn’t have access to any other way, and a couple personal files that looked worth saving. My external hard drive didn’t want to cooperate with these machines either, and I couldn’t lay my hands on a jump drive.
Finally I decided to try Google Drive. I had to update Firefox on the old laptop to get Drive to even open on it, and that was a halting process that froze once in the middle, but finally I was able to get Drive cooperating and upload the entire Owned Ebooks folder. Then I decided to browse the documents folder on that laptop for anything else worth saving. And I hit an unexpected mother lode of memories.
Scattered throughout another folder named “Stuff from External Hard Drive” were folders containing virtually every attempt I made at writing fiction between summer 2004, when I had just graduated high school, through 2017. None of it’s any good, of course, but it’s nice to know I’ve managed to hang on to just about all of it. I moved it all into my Google Drive.
I then copied the Young Wizards books into my Kindle cloud, which accepted them with a little grumbling that they’re mobi files, for which Amazon is perpetually on the verge of stopping support. But they look just fine on my current Kindle. I’d like to believe I’ll take this little odyssey as a reason to get them read, but I have my doubts.
Late Democracy 