My External Drive is Broken; and I Think That's Breaking Me

For those of you who follow my YouTube shenanigans, you might have noticed I’ve been unusually quiet as of late. Aside from a few posts on social media basically saying “I’m putting this aside for a future video”, I haven’t given any real updates. No release timelines, no previews— only a stream where I unveiled some very troubling lawsuits a prominent F1 family is facing.

There’s a simple reason why: my external hard drive, the lifeblood of everything I do online, can’t be read on my computer anymore. It was all of a sudden, too. My drive didn’t warn me it was about to die— it just suddenly stopped making noises one October day. Every script draft, research file, and editing project is now locked behind a piece of hardware that refuses to respond to my MacBook. So much for allowing it to cameo in all of my videos.

I tried everything in my own power to get the drive to respond— safe mode, disk utility, cable after cable. Nothing worked. So I sent it to a professional data recovery service, hoping they’d get the problem sorted out.

The service started promising. The professionals opened the drive and discovered that the internal read/write heads had failed, with nothing touching the data itself. They told me they felt “very confident” that they’d recover my work. And in the hopes that I’d get back on my feet as soon as I could, I paid for the expedited recovery process.

But then, there was silence. A silence you grow worried about when your entire career is on that drive. I got no updates, no progress logs… not even an imaging report. After a brief clarifying email where I learned that my drive self-encrypts, my next contact with the recovery team was the news I dreaded: my data could not be recovered.

Long story short: the donor heads failed mid-operation, the drive’s controller board died during the process, and because my drive uses self-encryption, the engineers could no longer access the data. Without that original chip functioning, recovery became impossible.

But that didn’t mean my data is gone for good. While the recovery service couldn’t recover the data with their tools, the data itself was still in the drive. They were even able to bring the drive back to life long enough to see that the data is still there. The combination of failures my drive is facing, as well as the specific brand/model I use, simply required a more specialized lab.

That brings us to now, the middle of November. I’m currently in talks with such a specialty lab to send my drive for recovery, using the information the previous lab gave me to explain the specific issues it’s facing. Once I send it off again, all I can do is hope the specialty lab has better luck and that I can get three years’ work back in my hands.

Because of all this, my YouTube work is at a standstill. The script for my next video is done, but I can’t annotate it for voiceovers and guest stars until my data is back. All of my background music remains to be recovered. All my raw b-roll footage, my photo assets, all of my long-form material… It’s all locked behind a drive that died at the worst possible moment.

It doesn’t mean I’m out of commission entirely, though. I can still write, plan, and research for future projects. My Substack/Beehiiv, Instagram, and TikTok are all flourishing. But without that drive, I can’t produce at the level I expect from myself. Almost all of my major projects are on that drive. Three years of scaffolding, momentum, and refinement are sitting on a piece of hardware that failed without warning.

So while the rest of my platforms are still active, the engine room is offline. I’m rebuilding what I can from memory and old exports, mapping out future investigative pieces, and continuing to grow the other branches of my work. Still, the full force of what I create won’t return until that drive does. When the specialty lab takes over, I’ll update you. But until then, I’m doing what any creator does when their tools collapse under them— keep moving with what I have until the archive comes home.

That’s all for now. See you soon

-F