Your Hard Drive Is Lying To You
Offer update, November 2026. The linked products have paid editions. Earlier free-offer wording and download counts in this piece do not establish current prices or verified paid sales. See the store for the editions and prices. Existing buyers keep their purchased access.
Revenue Operations for Creators — Revenue Operations for Creators is the back office of a one-person business crammed onto a single page. What to track. What to ignore. How to tell whether last month made money or just kept you busy as hell. Four bucks. I put it together because running a business on gut feeling works right up until the quarter you have to explain where it all went.
Dolphins Are Teaching Their Calves to Fish With Shells — Off the coast of Australia, researchers filmed dolphins chasing fish into empty shells, then hauling the whole shell up and dumping the catch straight into their mouths. They’d suspected for years that the mothers were teaching the trick to their calves. Now there’s footage. Which means there’s been a trade school running down there this whole time and nobody thought to tell us.
THE TIP. Your hard drive is lying to you and it’s not even trying that hard to hide it.
Bit rot is real. (Yes, that’s really what it’s called. No, nobody consulted me on the branding.) Files degrade sitting completely untouched on a drive, one flipped bit at a time, and nothing tells you. No warning light, no email, no little pop-up going “hey, this is dying.” The file opens fine right up until the day it doesn’t, and by then your backup has probably been rotting on the exact same schedule, because you copied a good file onto bad media once and called the job done.
Checksums. That’s it, and almost nobody bothers. First time you save something you actually give a shit about, run sha256sum on it and write the hash down somewhere that is NOT sitting next to the file. Six months later, run it again. Same hash? File’s fine, go about your day. Different hash? Something’s wrong, and you found out on your own schedule instead of the day you actually needed the damn thing.
I run this quarterly now on every master in the catalog. Ugly spreadsheet, nothing fancy. Quarterly’s probably overkill. I do not give a shit. Call it a smoke detector for the archive. You know when most folks find out their backup’s garbage? The day they need it. THAT day. Not one day sooner!
Do it for whatever you’d genuinely be pissed to lose, fam. Manuscripts. Masters. Scans. The tax stuff you swear you’ll never need again until the one year you absolutely do. Ten minutes to set up, and then it sits there doing nothing for years. Nothing is the good outcome.
Anybody else running a paranoid setup like this, or am I the only one checking hashes on files nobody’s opened in years? Hit reply and prove me wrong! ~ J.D.
End of brief · the tower is warm