@Ivan Reese, in episode 9 of a podcast I can’t tell if I’m supposed to know about or not, you asked, “Where is [data] going when you’re throwing it away, and when you rewind, how does it come back?” And I don’t think it has answers that you’d want to apply directly to your situation, but Feynman’s Lectures on Computing comes back to the idea of reversible computing again and again with various playful metaphorical lenses. I think that at the very least it might be a nice way to take a break and think about the problem from a physicist’s perspective now and then, if this is still a problem you’re working on.