The water came up through the floor drain first. Rachel watched it from the top of the basement stairs at six in the morning, holding a cup of coffee she had not yet drunk. The drain was a small brass disc set into the concrete near the furnace, and the water around it was already an inch deep and spreading outward in a dark, patient ring. She put the coffee down on the kitchen counter. She went back to the top of the stairs. She stood there for what she later remembered as a long time and what was probably thirty seconds.
The storm had been forecast for days. Toronto had been told to expect rain of a kind the city was not drained for. The news had used the phrase once in a decade on the Wednesday evening broadcast, and Rachel had moved the most important things off the floor: the boxes of prints waiting for clients, the paper negatives from a personal project she was developing by hand, the old leather camera bag her father had given her when she started. She had not moved the drive array. The array lived on a low shelf bolted into the wall behind her editing desk, four spinning disks in a Thunderbolt enclosure, and she had thought of the shelf as off the floor. The shelf was six inches off the floor.
By seven she was on the phone with her insurance company. By eight the water was above her knees. By noon it was four feet deep in the low corner of the room, and the enclosure, the desk, and the small rolling cabinet where she kept her hard-drive sleeves were all under it.
Rachel has been photographing weddings for twelve years. She started by accident, the way most wedding photographers do — a friend of a friend asked her to shoot a courthouse ceremony for two hundred dollars and a dinner, and she did it on a camera she had bought used from a retired newspaper photographer in Scarborough. The pictures were better than either of them expected. Word moved. A year later she was shooting eighteen weddings a season. Five years later she had an assistant, a business account, and a basement studio in a house in the east end she had bought specifically because it had a basement she could work in.
She shoots in a documentary register. She does not pose people. She waits. Her Instagram is full of grandmothers holding the hands of grandchildren at reception tables, brides laughing at something outside the frame, fathers crying quietly in doorways. She photographs weddings the way other people photograph news. She is not interested in the dress as a dress. She is interested in the minute before the dress is put on and the hour after it is taken off.
She delivers inside four weeks, which is faster than most of her peers. Couples hire her in part because of this. The four-week cadence is something she enforces on herself the way other people enforce a running schedule. It is the reason she had three full weddings sitting unedited on the array when the water came up. She had shot the first on the twentieth, the second on the twenty-first, and the third on the twenty-seventh. She had ingested all three. She had made her first-pass selections for two of them. She had not yet begun colour work on any.
The numbers, when she wrote them down later for the insurance adjuster, were these. Two point four terabytes of raw files. Roughly eighty-one thousand frames across three shoots. Three couples whose contracted delivery dates fell inside the next thirty-two days. The first delivery — a wedding of ninety guests at a farm outside Prince Edward County — was due on a Friday eight days after the flood. The couple had written their thank-you speeches around the idea of sending the gallery link to their parents before the parents flew home from Ontario the following week. Rachel knew this because she had been at the rehearsal dinner.
The financial cost of losing the weddings was, in the abstract, manageable. Her contracts carry force-majeure language. She could have refunded the three couples and carried on. The cost she could not carry was the other one. These were not reshoots. A wedding is a single afternoon in the life of two families, and a wedding photographer who loses the files from a wedding has taken something from the family that cannot be returned. Rachel had been present at the ceremonies. She had the only copies of what she had seen.
She had the only copies, and she had a second set of copies in macup Cloud.
The recovery
On the Thursday evening, from a hotel room on Queen Street where her insurance company had put her and her partner up, Rachel opened her laptop and signed into her macup dashboard. The three weddings were there, catalogued by the dates she had ingested them. The last snapshot of the array had run at 2:47 on the Thursday morning, about three hours before the drain had started to weep. She could see the snapshot. She did not yet try to restore from it. She closed the laptop. She ordered room service. She slept.
On the Friday morning she drove to a computer store on College Street and bought a new workstation and an eight-terabyte internal drive, which she had installed before lunch. She carried the machine home in the back of her partner’s car. Her own basement was still, at that hour, being pumped out by a company her insurance had sent. She set up the new machine on the dining table upstairs. She signed into macup on it. She entered the recovery passphrase she had written down in a notebook four years earlier and kept, for reasons she could not have explained at the time, in the top drawer of the kitchen. She began the first restore.
The first restore — the August twentieth wedding, about seven hundred gigabytes — ran for roughly fourteen hours. She did not sit and watch it. She went for a walk along the lake with her partner. She ate dinner. She slept. In the morning the files were there. She opened Lightroom and her catalogue for that shoot opened with them, untouched, the first-pass selections intact because she had made them on the array and the array had been snapshotting in the background while she worked.
The second wedding took another twelve hours and ran overnight on the Saturday. The third took eleven. By the Monday morning, all three were on the new workstation. She began colour work on the first wedding at ten that morning. She delivered the gallery on the Friday, eight days after the storm, three days before the couple’s parents flew home.
She delivered the second gallery nine days later. The third, on the contracted date.
I don’t think of it as a disaster story. I think of it as the weekend I slept in a hotel and the work kept moving without me.
Somewhere in the middle of the second restore, sitting at the dining table with her coffee going cold beside the trackpad, Rachel noticed something. The snapshot she was pulling from had been taken at 2:47 on the Thursday morning. She had not been at her desk at 2:47 on the Thursday morning. She had been asleep in bed upstairs. She had not, in fact, opened the laptop that had been sitting closed on the dining table since the Saturday before — the Saturday of the third wedding, the wedding she had come home from at one in the morning and ingested on the array and gone to bed.
Five days had passed between her ingesting the third wedding and the flood. In those five days she had not sat down at the array once. She had been out scouting locations for a shoot in November, and she had been at the rehearsal dinner for the August twentieth couple, and she had been doing the unglamorous in-between work that fills the week of a working photographer. She had not opened her editing laptop. The backups had happened anyway. They had happened while she was sleeping in a farmhouse in Prince Edward County, and while she was eating dinner at the rehearsal, and while she was standing in a field at dusk with a client thinking about light.
She told the story, later, to one of the other photographers she sometimes assists with. She did not tell it as a macup story. She told it as a story about habit. The array had backed itself up on a cadence she had set and then forgotten, and the cadence had not known or cared that she was not in the room. She had set the cadence in a quiet moment four years ago, and the cadence had done its work for four years, and on the night before the flood it had done its work one last time.
She is back in the basement now. The shelf is higher. The array is different. She runs two backup sets instead of one — the cloud, and an external SSD she carries in her camera bag when she shoots out of town. She has not, in her own account, become a more careful person. She has become a person who is slightly better at admitting that carefulness is not what saves you.
The coffee cup from the morning of the flood is still in the cupboard. She did not drink it. She threw it out some weeks later. It tasted like the basement by then.