Sandee called me from home Friday to say she was having trouble playing music from our primary music server. Every time she selected a song iTunes complained that it couldn’t find the file. I had a plausible explanation at the time and didn’t think much of it, but Sandee was really reporting something much more serious: the complete loss of all our music.

Over the past five years or so, we’d built a collection of about 65 gigabytes of music, just under 20,000 files that could play 24/7 for over two months straight without repeating. The sense of loss was — and is — palpable.

The hard drive sounds like a vacuum cleaner sucking up pennies, so I’m not really surprised that the recovery software has failed. I’m always a strong advocate for personal backups, so more than one person has pointed out the irony that I don’t have a real backup of this data. Anyway, I’m rebuilding. I’ve recovered the contents of my iPod, I’ve got a few scattered files backed up here and there, but most of it is being re-encoded from the source CDs.

If nothing else, please back up your data.

Posted July 21, 2004 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Technology. .

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