The progress bar sat frozen at seven percent. It had been there for twenty minutes.
: I selected exFAT . It was the universal language, ensuring this drive could speak to both the Macs of my present and the Windows PCs of whatever comes next. reformat external hard drive
In reality, reformatting wasn't violent. It was bureaucratic. It didn’t actually shred the files or melt the platters. It simply removed the map. It told the computer, "There is nothing here but empty space." The files would still be there, lingering in the magnetic sectors, waiting to be overwritten, but the path to them would be severed. The index would be burned. The address book would be scrubbed. The progress bar sat frozen at seven percent