About a week ahead of my birthday this year, I had a sudden, urgent need to hear my dad’s voice.  

The twenty-seventh of last July marked five years since I’ve heard it in real time – technically, five years and ten days, because our last phone call was a little under two weeks before he died. I talked to my dad fairly regularly, took pictures with him less so, and to my eternal regret, took even fewer videos of him. So few, in fact, that I have none. Not one video with or of my dad from the last fifteen years.  

Most people have a slew of home movies to consult in moments like these, but in that moment this past February, I had no such luck. Not only did I live about a thousand miles away from the pile of our family’s home movies, but the home movies themselves had for several years presented their own challenge. Sometime in the early 2000’s, my sister had the forethought to transfer the aging VHS tapes they were recorded on to DVDs. She spent meticulous weeks one summer watching every single home movie, since you had to play them to transfer them, pressing all the right buttons to get them safely burned onto this significantly more resilient format. Birthdays, backyard play sessions, a random recording of my dad’s then-commute home through Newport Beach…she watched and recorded them all.  

Thinking the home movies were now safe in their fancy new format, none of us really clocked what happened to the original VHS tapes. The last time I can remember seeing them, they were in neat rows inside of one of those faux wood, stackable, slide-open tape holders that everyone had in the nineties. During the disbursement of my family’s shared possessions in 2011 when we lost our house (shout out to the economic crisis of 2008), who knows where they went. Their unknown location was no big deal right up until the next time we tried to watch the DVDs, and every single one of them failed to work.  

Our first thought was that the movies had been recorded incorrectly. My sister took one of the discs to a specialist, who told her, very matter of fact and with absolutely no awareness that he was crushing our collective family history, that none of the DVDs would work in any DVD player outside of the one that had created them, and there was nothing we could do about it. Since we couldn’t even figure out where the originals had ended up, I will let you guess whether we had any remote idea of where that DVD player had ended up either. (We did not.)  

Despite all the DVDs being deemed to be in a useless vegetative state, when I moved to Washington last year, my sister gave me the disc containing my first birthday, and I promised I would do my best to find a way to make it work. Life happened, and I promptly forgot about it until that moment last February when, more than anything, I wanted to hear my dad’s voice again. 

So, with the sense of urgency of someone that knows there is only one way to make something happen, and you are that way, I decided to get my first birthday DVD out of its prolonged coma.  

I did a fair bit of Google searching for a data retrieval specialist to assist. I found a few, but none that sounded remotely confident that they’d be able to solve my issue. The last one I spoke to admitted he could try, thought it was unlikely it would work, and would then feel bad charging me for the failed attempt. Because the experts didn’t seem to have any faith in their own ability to solve my problem, I thought I would try and solve it myself.  

The first and foremost mystery to solve was exactly what was wrong with the DVD, and therein was my biggest challenge. If you simply Google “my DVD won’t play”, that problem is simply too vague, and you’ll get nowhere fast. Most forums will assume your disc has physical damage, but I was absolutely sure that wasn’t the case here because they were all pristine. Others would suggest that your disc actually never had any data recorded on it in the first place, but I knew that wasn’t true either: you could see the varying degrees to which data had been physically stored on each disc by flipping them over and taking a careful look at where the iridescent digital surface started and stopped.  

In my many, many searches, the most promising website I found was Pacific Video Repair, an amazing company conveniently located in Washington state, that specialized in data recovery from damaged VHS tapes. On their FAQ page, a somewhat vague answer about problematic DVD files made it sound like they might be familiar with my conundrum. Hopeful for the first time in months, I sent them an email asking if they’d be able to help me even though what I needed was outside the regular scope of their work.  

Pacific Video Repair got back to me within 24 hours and the answer, unfortunately, was a hard no. But they did say in their response that they were, in fact, very familiar with the issue I was describing, and that it sounded like what had happened was that the video files had not been successfully finalized when they were originally recorded on the disc, leaving them only playable on the DVD player they were recorded on.  

Now that is a level of specificity a girl can Google! 

With this added descriptor to my problem, it was not long before I found this incredibly random six-year-old video on YouTube, made by someone who doesn’t even seem to specialize in this kind of content, with over 1,600 likes and 340 comments from highly emotional people JUST LIKE ME, desperately looking for a way to rescue their old DVDs. And those comments, my friends, were euphoric and filled with profuse thanks – because the method described in this guy’s sixteen-minute video fucking worked.  

It took two excruciating days for me to find this out for myself, because I had to locate a working computer with both a DVD drive and access to the internet, and holy shit is that harder to do in 2024 than I would’ve thought. But I ordered a new power cord for the Sony Vaio my parents had bought me back in college, spent over an hour getting it turned on and updated to 2024 standards, and then followed TheMaxAcceleration’s step-by-step directions.  

Like the hundreds of commentors on that video, within twenty minutes, I was absolutely bawling, my nearly-thirty-five-year-old self watching my one-year-old self seated in the middle of our old condo, both of us listening to my dad chat aimlessly with my grandpa and great uncle. Hearing my dad call me “sweetie pie”, something he had not done for years and I had long forgotten he ever did, was worth every minute of the struggle.  

When my sister visited in July she brought the rest of the DVDs to be rescued, and although life happened again and it’s taken me ages to do so, I’ve now successfully recovered all but three of them. While what I had been most excited about at the onset of this adventure was to unlock the home videos I remembered most – ones with my sisters and I being in turns obnoxious and adorable towards one another, or ones with my extended family ceremoniously gathered in folding chairs as one of us opens presents on a birthday – my favorite, by far, is one of my parents before any of us were born.  

My mom is heavily pregnant with my oldest sister, and my dad, in anticipation of her arrival, has just purchased the video camera that would come to film every one of our home movies. The entire video is just clips of the two of them hanging out with their cat in their messy 1985 apartment. They are so relaxed, so happy, and so silly. My dad sounds just like I remember, and my mom’s voice is equally unchanged. In a moment of quiet she suggests making a cheeseburger casserole for dinner, to which my dad says “that sounds like a great idea”, and then it cuts to my mom holding the camera, filming first my dad and then herself in the mirrored sliding door of a nearby closet. Shortly after that, it cuts again, the camera now back in my dad’s hands, and for no more than five seconds, there’s my mom, age thirty, hanging out on the sofa, smiling up at my dad. Another cut and a shot of her walking through the hallway towards the kitchen; another and she’s picked up a freshly baked layer of cake and taking a whiff, then holding up a jar of frosting and saying “frosting”, pointing at the calendar and saying “November!”…because I guess with the novelty of a brand-new video camera, what else is there to say?  

My oldest sister’s birthday was yesterday, which means that footage was being filmed just over thirty-nine years ago today. I don’t really have anything more profound to share than all of that; to put to paper this new memory of unlocking old memories, only to find ones that don’t even really belong to me, but matter that much more because of it.