The Quiet Role of Luck in Research

It started with an error message.

I was running MRI preprocessing — nothing unusual, the same pipeline I’d used before, the same steps others in the lab had run dozens of times. But instead of humming along, it stopped. Cannot locate files. I stared at it for a moment, confused in the way you’re confused when something that has always worked suddenly doesn’t.

I checked the code. I checked the path. Then I checked the server folder.

The folder was gone.

Not a small folder. A folder that had existed since 2009. Over fifteen years of people coming and going: undergrads, grad students, postdocs, visiting researchers, each one adding something. Scripts written by people who have since left and moved across the world. Reference files and toolboxes accumulated over years. Dependencies that our preprocessing pipeline quietly assumes will just be there. Not an archive. A living, working part of the lab’s computing resources — and it had simply vanished.

I went to the server snapshots, half in shock, half hoping I had simply misremembered something. Maybe the folder had always been somewhere else. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place. But I wasn’t. We keep hourly, daily, and weekly backups — but only for a month. The further back you go, the coarser the resolution: hourly snapshots age into daily ones, daily into weekly. By the time I found this, the folder had already been gone long enough that we were down to weekly snapshots. It was there in one, gone in the next — deleted sometime in the two to three weeks prior.

Two more weeks and there would have been nothing to restore.

I flagged it and worked with IT. It took several days of back and forth — locating the right snapshot, confirming the right folder — before they were ready to restore. The actual restoration, once it finally started, took almost a full day. A reminder of how large the folder had grown over the years. And even then, it wasn’t fully recovered. Anything added or changed between the last clean snapshot and the day the folder was deleted was gone for good.

Not a bad ending for what could have been a catastrophic loss.

Here’s what I keep thinking about though.

It was summer. The kind of quiet stretch where most people are traveling, writing, or just not touching the server. Nobody had any reason to go near that folder. Under normal circumstances, it could have sat there — deleted, unnoticed — for months. And our backups only go back one month.

The only reason we caught it was a happy coincidence. My PI had asked me to run some preprocessing — nothing urgent, just something she wanted done sooner rather than later. I had planned to get to it after my defense, about three months away. But I needed a break from writing, and preprocessing felt like a productive way to procrastinate.

If the timing had been slightly different, we would have opened that folder one day to find nothing, and found nothing in the backups too.

We have backups. We have a dedicated IT team. We have good, knowledgeable people in the lab. By most measures, we are a reasonably well-run academic lab. And yet what actually saved fifteen years of shared work was a chain of coincidences thin enough to list in a single sentence: that specific task, that PI nudge, that procrastination urge, that exact week. That was luck. Quiet, unremarkable, almost invisible luck.

We got lucky. We still don’t know exactly what happened — who deleted it, or how. And honestly, that’s not really the point. Shared infrastructure — the folders and scripts and toolboxes that everyone uses and nobody truly owns — runs on something beyond best practices. It runs on collective trust. Nobody was being careless on purpose. These things happen. What struck me was just how much luck had to line up for us to catch it in time — and how easily it could have gone the other way.

Anyway, this whole ordeal cost me a few days of thesis writing. But we recovered the folder, saved the pipeline, and I got a blog post out of it. Luck, it turns out, was wearing a Cerebellum NODDI disguise.