Nearly a decade ago I was asked by The Washington Post to put together a special section to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the first manned landing on the moon. As the editor of the project, I rounded up the usual suspects, including the administrator of NASA, a couple of people from Congress, Vice President Al Gore, and an astronaut or two. But somewhere along the line it struck me that the one person I really needed to include was the person who had made the moon come alive for me, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke.

During that summer of 1999, I contacted Clarke and explained the project. I asked him to speculate on what the landing on the moon would mean for space travel and the future of mankind. A couple of weeks later the article arrived by e-mail, with a note inviting me to edit the piece as needed. I read the submission with deep appreciation and noted that it should run at the top of the section's front page. Clarke would get top billing. But I didn't change a word he'd written.

I was careful to save the original submission in my files, and I carefully backed it up to my NetWare server, where I knew it would be safe even if something happened to my computer and my backup disks.

But of course, nothing is ever safe in this world, and the latest iteration of that server started having disk problems. Despite the RAID 1 configuration, Disk 0 started to degrade, and Disk 1 mirrored the problem. By the time I discovered the problem, I couldn't access either disk. All of my archived files, including the things I'd written for eWEEK, both recently and back when it was called PC WEEK, were on that disk.

Nothing I could do would reach that data. Everything, including the file containing Clarke's story, was apparently gone. I called a local company that does (among other things) data recovery, but to no avail. They tried but couldn't handle a damaged NetWare volume.

Then, just by chance, I got a call from Ontrack Data Recovery. Could they, I wondered, recover the missing data? They said they could. I already had the disks out of the server, so I hopped into the car with them and drove straight over to Ontrack Data Recovery's Reston, Va., office. I handed over the box containing the two drives, met with the technicians to let them know what to look for, and left.

In a remarkably short period of time, I headed once again up the Fairfax County Parkway to Reston and was met by a cheerful staff of Ontrack technicians. They gave me my old drives, a holder for five DVDs, and a tour of the lab. They'd recovered everything from the backup disk in the RAID 1 set. The primary disk was toast, so if I hadn't used a mirrored disk array, I'd be without those files.

The first thing I did when I got back to the office was restore the files to a handy server on the network so they'd be in more than one place, then I ordered new disks for the NetWare server. Those arrived while I was at CeBIT, so in a few days I'll have NetWare up and running again.

Today, however, I found out that my top writer from that special issue died. Arthur C. Clarke reached 90 years old a few weeks ago, and now has finally joined the ages. He left more than 100 books behind, he left us with the invention of the communications satellite, and he left us with a wealth of some of the best short stories ever written. And he left me with one short manuscript, perhaps 800 words, of a story that I treasure because he wrote it for me.

But without a plan to preserve that data (that only mostly worked) and some good data recovery (that worked beyond my expectations) I wouldn't have that story now. Only the printed copy would remain, and newsprint -- even from The Washington Post -- only lasts so long.

So now I have another plan. In addition to moving the story back to the NetWare server when I put it back together, Arthur C. Clarke's essay along with a few other treasured pieces will be copied to a CD and stored in my safe deposit box along with my book manuscripts and other valuable items. Perhaps there they'll last a little longer.