Worth 1,000 Words? Okay. But $2,700?

I remember all these moments -- and hundreds more -- but do I remember them or the photos of them? Is it possible any longer to have a pure memory of an unmediated experience?

In his short story "The Adventure of a Photographer," Italo Calvino has this to say of obsessive shutterbugs: "It is only when they have the photos before their eyes that they seem to take tangible possession of the day they spent, only then that the mountain stream, the movement of the child with his pail, the glint of the sun on the wife's legs take on the irrevocability of what has been and can no longer be doubted. Everything else can drown in the unreliable shadow of memory."

The unreliable shadow of memory. That's where my past resides. And so I decide yes, I'm willing to pay $2,700 for the digital necromancy that can retrieve my images.

Two weeks after my hard drive was shipped west, I get a call from David at DriveSavers. His voice has the measured tone of a surgeon delivering bad news: calm, compassionate, but also blameless.

"It's not going to give up any data," David says of the hard drive. "There was too much physical trauma." The drive will be replaced under warranty, but the photographs are gone.

And the memories? The fireworks on bonfire night, the gargoyles of Magdalen College, the rocky cliffs of western Ireland, my daughters in Oxford garden party finery . . .

I close my eyes and scroll through them in the hard drive of my brain.

My e-mail:kellyj@washpost.com. And it should go without saying: If you've never backed up your digital photos, do it RIGHT NOW!