The Corrupted Save File: A Poster Series on Data Loss Stories

Abstract

What did you lose? A wedding photo album when a hard drive failed. Ten years of emails when a provider shut down. A novel draft, half-finished, to a corrupted USB stick. A child's first words, recorded on a phone that never synced. These stories are everywhere—yet rarely spoken aloud. "The Corrupted Save File" is a poster series that makes visible the invisible epidemic of personal data loss. Digital preservation discourse often centres on institutional collections: archives, libraries, museums. But the most emotionally significant digital objects—family photographs, creative work, personal correspondence—live on consumer devices with no preservation strategy whatsoever. When loss occurs, it is experienced as private grief rather than systemic failure. This poster series brings these stories into public view, using the visual language of retro video games to create immediate emotional resonance. The poster employs pixel art aesthetics deliberately. The "corrupted save file" is a shared cultural trauma for anyone who grew up with games: hours of progress, vanished. By framing personal data loss through this lens, the poster connects institutional preservation concerns to lived experience. The aesthetic also evokes nostalgia, fragility, and the passage of technological time—themes central to digital preservation. The poster presents anonymised first-person narratives of data loss, each visualised as a "game over" screen or corrupted game state. Stories include: a researcher who lost fieldwork recordings; a family whose only photos of a deceased grandparent were on a stolen laptop; an artist whose portfolio existed only on a failed SSD; a writer whose manuscript vanished in a cloud service migration. Each narrative is brief (20–40 words), paired with pixel art iconography representing what was lost: a camera, a document, a heart, a music note. Beyond emotional impact, the poster includes a practical call to action: simple steps for personal digital preservation (the 3-2-1 backup rule, format migration basics, cloud redundancy). A QR code links to resources from organisations like the Digital Preservation Coalition and Library of Congress personal archiving guides. The goal is not only to evoke feeling but to convert that feeling into behaviour change.