As many people learned during the late April storms, it is easy to take many things in our modern lives for granted– until we no longer have them. Electricity, refrigeration, hot showers, in-door plumbing, and even passable roads all silently and steadfastly, although it turns out tenuously, wait on us in our lives of convenience and immediacy.
    While we survived the storm intact and largely uninterrupted, last week the Sentry learned this lesson the hard way.
    Modern computers are truly marvels of human ingenuity. Like many technological devices that inhabit our world, it is not necessary to know how a computer works in order to know how to work it. We stuff them with photos without bothering to understand what “.jpg” stands for; we keep up with friends and shop for shoes thinking that the internet is a miniaturized system of pneumatic tubes and we sleep soundly with the belief that “saving” a “document” is some sort of incontrovertible truth up there with death and taxes as if that humming is the sound of fairy stenographers working away with chisels and stone.
    We believe this right up to the point when our computer fails and someone far more knowledgeable in things technological takes on the role of grim-faced surgeon tells us its gone, all gone.
    Last Thursday, the Sentry’s primary computer, my computer, suffered a catastrophic failure, that rendered several years worth– hundreds of issues and photographs and thousands of stories, letters, events, emails, addresses and other items related to past, present and future issues of the paper– irretrievable. While it seems our worst fears of a total loss may not have been realized, by press time we have not been able to catalog what is saved and what is not.
    This admission begs the question, “was there no back-up?” Unfortunately, the information on this computer had not been backed up in more than a year.
    As a result, readers and contributors may notice an abbreviated selection of “Things to Do” for the week. For those who contributed and counted on their events being publicized in the Sentry, I deeply apologize that in all likelihood, the information you provided was a casualty of our computer failure.
    If you submitted publicity for an event that is coming up or contributed news you expected to see in the Sentry, please assume we no longer have that information and please resend it to editor@inthesentry.com. We would be contacting you, if we knew who you were or had your email address. If your event was to take place before May 18, I can only offer apologies.

–Ward Peck