400 Gigabytes of Terror

Man, I’m pissed. I bought a new extra-huge hard drive for my Mac mini because the internal one sat me down and had a long heartfelt talk with me about how it needed more space. I’m not sure what exactly was taking up so much room; it sure wasn’t my “novel.” I guess all those lengthy fan letters to the G4 TV show hosts and hostesses started to add up. Or else it was all the scratch audio for my “Pieces of Chuck” podcast.

Because I’ve been working with or around computers for the past 16 years of my life, I’m an expert at them and knew exactly the first thing to do when I installed my new hard drive: copy every single document, music file, photo, video, and game file to the new drive and delete them from the old one. And because I’m extra double-plus smart, I made sure to include all my work files in that.

When I woke up this morning afternoon today, I saw that I’d shut down my Mac but left the hard drive running. I turned it off to go take a shower, and that was the last time it was heard from ever again.

I’m pretty sure that not much is lost permanently. It looks like it’s just the enclosure’s power supply that’s bad and the drive is still most likely in good shape. And I backed up just about everything to DVD (except my iTunes library) when I got the new drive; worst case, I’d lose some minor changes to the work stuff and have to restore all my music off the iPod. It was annoying enough a couple weeks ago, when I copied my music over to the new drive without doing it exactly like iTunes wanted me to, so I lost all my ratings, playlists, and my play history.

If nothing else, it’ll encourage me to do more frequent backups in the future. And I have a healthier respect for all ths Web 2.0 business, since I notice my website and Gmail accounts are still golden. Now I just have to mail back the drive (at my expense), wait for them to fix it and mail it back to me, and pray really really hard that they pay attention to my instructions and don’t format the hard drive.

Also: another SFist post about Apple.