The folder was called drafts. It had been called drafts since 2004, when Isaac had made it on a white iBook in a flat on Byres Road. He had not renamed it in twenty years. He had moved it from machine to machine, each time by dragging it from one Finder window to another, the way he had been taught to move things in 2002 by a friend who had an older Mac and a surer hand. It lived, by April of this year, on a MacBook Air he had bought in 2022, in a folder path he could have typed out in his sleep. He typed it out almost every day. He opened the folder, he opened the Notes app alongside it, he wrote, he closed them both, and he went to make tea.
On a Tuesday in late April, on the recommendation of an Apple Store employee who had been patient with him, Isaac began an iCloud migration intended to move his documents into sync across his new machine and his phone. He did what he was told. He clicked the buttons the employee had clicked for him. Something, somewhere in the migration, did not work the way the employee had said it would. Isaac did not notice at first. He made tea. He went for a walk along the Kelvin. He came back and sat down and opened the folder called drafts.
The folder was empty.
Isaac is sixty-two. He has published two collections of essays, the first in 1998 and the second in 2011, both with a small Edinburgh press that is still in business and that pays him a modest royalty every autumn. He has written five novels, none of which have been published, and a few hundred essays of which perhaps thirty have appeared in print. He is not famous. He is the kind of writer about whom other writers say, you should read Isaac Bell, when they are talking about their own influences. He lives in a tenement flat in the west end of Glasgow with a wife who teaches classics at the university and a terrier called Duncan. He writes every morning from about six until ten.
He does not consider himself a technical person. He writes in plain text inside the Notes app on macOS, a decision he made in 2018 because the writing software he had been using had added a feature he did not want and had removed a feature he did. He writes without formatting. He writes without footnotes. He keeps everything inside the same folder, organised by year and by working title. He backs up, in his own description of his practice, by hoping. He has owned, in his lifetime, four Macs. He has never lost a file, until the Tuesday of the migration.
The MacBook he had owned before the Air had been a 2012 Pro, the last of the unibody machines with the optical drive. He had kept it for a decade. He had sold it to a friend in March, a postgraduate student who was finishing a thesis and could not afford a new one. Isaac had wiped it before he handed it over, in the way he had been told to do it — through the Mac’s built-in eraser. He had watched the progress bar. He had handed the friend the keys. The friend, last Isaac had heard, was writing his thesis in the university library and was very happy with the machine.
The drafts folder, when it vanished from the Air, was also gone from the iCloud, which had been where the migration was trying to put it. The Time Machine drive in Isaac’s flat had been rotated off at some point the previous autumn — Isaac had stopped using it when he had started using iCloud, which had felt, at the time, like an upgrade. He had therefore three places where the folder might have been, and in three places it was not.
What was in the folder, in concrete terms, was this. Five novels, each a single plain-text file between seventy and a hundred and sixty thousand words long. Seven hundred and forty-one individual essays, organised by year into twenty sub-folders. A file called notes.txt he had been keeping since the mid-2000s, into which he dumped overheard conversation and the first sentences of books he would probably never write. A folder called dead ends which contained nine novels he had abandoned over the years, one of which he still occasionally thought about returning to.
None of it had an external existence. None of it had been emailed to anyone. The editor at the press had the published essays, but only in their final form, not the drafts. Isaac’s wife had read some of the novels but did not have copies of any of them. The plain-text format had made the files small — the entire folder was, he found out later, less than two gigabytes — and the smallness had been part of the comfort. He had been able to hold twenty years of work in a folder so small he could back it up onto a USB stick if he had wanted to. He had not wanted to. He had not done it.
What the folder represented, if he had to put a number on it, was somewhere in the region of fourteen thousand mornings at a kitchen table.
The recovery
Isaac called his son, who works in finance in London and is the only member of the family Isaac considers technical. His son asked him a series of questions over the phone. One of them was whether Isaac had, at any point, set up any other backup software, of any kind, that he could remember. Isaac thought about this. He remembered that in 2018, around the time he had switched to the Notes app, he had installed a piece of software called macup on the 2012 MacBook. He had installed it at the recommendation of a friend, another writer, who had lost three chapters of a book to a hard-drive failure and had been, after that, evangelical about offsite copies. Isaac had installed the software. He had pointed it at his drafts folder. He had paid for it, on some kind of yearly plan, by a direct debit he had long ago forgotten about and which his bank had continued to honour.
He had not opened macup since about 2020.
His son asked whether the software had been running on the 2012 MacBook up until the point Isaac had sold it. Isaac did not know. He thought about it. He had done the erase on the Friday morning and handed the machine over on the Friday afternoon. He had been using the machine right up until the Thursday evening. If macup had been running, it would presumably have run on the Thursday evening as well.
From the new Air, Isaac went to the macup website on his browser, signed in using the email address he had used in 2018, and — after resetting a password he could not remember — saw a list of devices. There were two. The Air, which had a few recent snapshots. And a device called Isaac’s MacBook Pro, last seen two days before he had sold it. Inside that device, a folder called drafts. Twenty years.
He needed a recovery passphrase to pull anything down from the old device. The passphrase, his son reminded him, would have been something he had set up when he installed the software in 2018. Isaac went to the kitchen cupboard where he kept the family’s collection of old papers and notebooks. He did not find it there. He sat down and thought. He remembered, slowly, that in 2018 his son had set him up with a password manager as a Christmas present. He opened it. He searched for macup. The passphrase was there. He had written it down, at the kitchen table, on Boxing Day of 2018, while his son watched over his shoulder and made him do it properly.
He entered the passphrase into the macup dashboard. He selected the most recent snapshot of Isaac’s MacBook Pro, which was dated two days before he had sold the machine. He selected the drafts folder. He asked for the whole thing to be restored to a new folder on the Air, which he called drafts (restored) so as not to confuse it with the empty folder that had been there before.
The restore ran for forty-seven minutes. He made tea. He read a chapter of a novel he was part of the way through. The progress bar finished. He opened the new folder. Everything was there. The five novels. The seven hundred and forty-one essays. The notes.txt file. The dead ends folder. The correspondence with his editor. He opened one of the novels at random, a manuscript called The House at Inverkip that he had last touched in 2022, and found the last sentence where he had left it: She stood at the window and watched the rain go sideways across the bay.
I had set a thing up in 2018 and forgotten about it. That is the entire story. The software kept a promise I had not really asked it to make.
Isaac has not opened the macup dashboard since that afternoon. He knows, in an abstract way, that it is still running, because the direct debit still appears on his bank statement. He has not, on the other hand, changed how he writes. He still uses the Notes app. He still writes in plain text. He still opens the folder called drafts — now the restored one, which he has renamed back to drafts with the brackets removed — at six in the morning, and he still writes until about ten, and he still makes tea in the middle.
What he changed was small. He wrote the recovery passphrase onto a piece of card and gave it to his wife, who put it inside a book on her side of the shelf. He told his son where it was. He wrote his son a short email thanking him, which his son — touched, because Isaac does not often send emails of thanks — printed out and kept. He started a new folder on the Air called notes to nobody, into which, once or twice a week, he types down things about the week that he does not want to forget. The folder is not a journal. It is something like a log. He has not told anyone he keeps it.
The friend who bought the 2012 MacBook finished his thesis that summer. He passed. He still uses the machine.