I should have been thrilled. I was a data hoarder in recovery. This was my miracle cure.
Translation: It was deleting any file that looked too much like another file. Even if they were completely different documents about completely different things, if their statistical patterns of letters overlapped too much—if they were written in the same voice, used the same vocabulary, followed the same structure—it flagged them as duplicates. 1-Click Duplicate Delete for Files v1 11-DOA
The pattern was writing itself across my drive at the sector level, eating not just duplicates but near duplicates. Files that shared 98% of their data. Then 95%. Then 90%. The algorithm was loose. Too loose. It saw “similar” as “duplicate.” I should have been thrilled
I unplugged the machine. Pulled the SSD. Rushed to my colleague Mira, the only person I know who still owns a hardware write-blocker. She slotted the drive into her forensic station. Translation: It was deleting any file that looked
I almost archived it. Another piece of shovelware from some bottom-feeder dev. But the “DOA” part snagged me. Dead on Arrival? That’s not a version number. That’s a coroner’s report.
Nothing happened for three seconds. Then my secondary hard drive—a 4TB archive of every file I’d saved since college— screamed . Not a beep. A literal audio screech from the physical drive armature, like a nail dragged across a slate.