iPod Therapy: Bringing your backup failures into the open

So the Scott from Erica's post got lucky. The laptop was returned with the hard drive untouched, the iPod was still under warranty, and the guy at the Apple store handed him a new one today. Everything is restored. But he still hasn't said a word about backing anything up.

We'll see.

I lost about 400 songs once when I screwed up a Windows XP install (I wasn't paying attention and hit the clean install option instead of repair) and my last CD back-up was a few weeks old. I was ticked - but at least the majority of my music (at the time) was safe.

My only true iPod horror story was with my 3G 30 GB unit -- at the last minute (like the day before), a friend and I decided to go to Miami for Spring Break with everyone else. My friend had just purchased a brand new Aluminum PowerBook and once we got to our hotel, I decided to hook up my iPod, so that we could listen to music. It was formatted for a PC, but you know, supposed to work when attached to a Mac - not the other way around. Or so I thought. Everything was fine at first, but then it just flat out froze during one song and refused to eject from the Mac. We ended up shutting the Mac down to disconnect the iPod, which was still frozen. I do all the typical hard and soft resets - nothing - the thing was stuck on a "Do Not Disconnect" screen for 6 hours until the battery died. When I got home and hooked it up the PC, it wouldn't even recognize the device -- like, it just didn't show up. It wouldn't even power on when plugged into the AC - I mean, the thing was just dead. In essence, the Mac killed my iPod. And as great as that anecdote is for parties or commiserating about computer mishaps, it wasn't good enough to make a 9 hour drive from Miami to Atlanta with no CDs, no iPod and only country or right-wing talk radio for more than half the trip.

Thankfully, I was still under warranty with the company I worked for at the time and got a 40 GB unit for the same price I paid for 30 (otherwise I was just out of the 1 year Apple warranty) - but still - it was traumatic. I was working at a PC tech bench at the time and we posted a picture of me holding my dead iPod on our wall with the words, "The Mac Killed My iPod" under our Authorized Apple logo.

@Johnny Thrash and Mark

While it's technically true that you're 'degrading' the quality of the music you've purchased by burning to disk and re-ripping, I find that I must point out that it would be difficult to prove that is the case. Sure, you can prove numerically that the final result isn't identical to what you downloaded, quality is a subjective value. I would bet even money that the reproduced analog signal would be virtually indistinguishable - by ear or test gear, provided you use a quality encoder and encode at at least the quality you originally got.

And of course, if you rip it lossless, then the quality should be essentially identical with the music you purchased.

This is why I've started the process of uploading all 90 gigs of my music to my dreamhost account... it's going to take a couple weeks, but it'll sure make me feel better. Plus I can stream it from everywhere.

It's a pain to try to put them all back together again when you lose a main drive or from files spread across a bunch of disks. We ended building on online system, mediamaster.com to store it all in the web and have your music be completely usable from the interface. Not another clunky disk backup system, but usable music. We are still building and extending it, but a bunch of other people seem to like it as well. Restore to your machine will be coming soon as well.

The problems with a no hassle linux file server is that you forget about it like I did. Back in 2001 I lost over 5 years of personal photos and documents when the basement file server crashed hard.

My personal files are now backed up to a replicated file server that is split between my home and my mothers. rsync keeps our individual collections synced in case the inevitable happens. I'm working on another solution based on USB drives since they are just SOOO damn cheap these days. Something that will take any size drive that's cheap and add it to the pool.

I lost about 20 gigs of music including several live concerts I recorded. I had everything on an external drive, and on my iPod. I was wiping the external drive, and reformatting it before selling it. I planned on using Senuti to rip everything back to my new drive. I procrastinated, and a week later my iPod was crushed while I was at a job site. So I was out an ipod, and my music. Suck.

I have some 250+ GB of music neatly stored in folders by genre and album (no messing with any software that has a library). Almost lost all twice by faulty RAM units that rendered the partitions unreadable (=250GB unallocated space - ouch), so now if this happens again, I'm already prepared psychologically in order to face the loss. Backup? Naaaaaah...

Yeah, if I had a nickel for every "Oops! I can't believe I deleted that."

I have more music than will fit on my MacBook, so my Music folder is on an OWC portable HD. I back up to one of the partitions on the family PC, and am in good graces with the IT Guy at work, so I also back up on the server which is also accessible from home via VPN.

I've also gotten in the habit of not having music that I don't own on CD or at least have access to the original source.

I wiped my computer knowing that is was all backed up on DVDs, only to find that a couple of the disks where scratched...

Music can easily be re-purchased though (and I had most of the original disks anyway); it's photos and home movies you've got to watch out for... you can't re-take/purchase/download from questionable sources those.