Brent Stace’s Weblog

One of my worse computer-related fears has come true - late last night I discovered that I lost all the data on my MP3 Hard Drive.
What happened: In the beginning of June, my iTunes was reporting that it could not move some songs over to my iPod. The dialog always listed 101 songs, but I think it was more than that. Anyhow, the songs would play just fine in iTunes. Before I called Apple Support to see if they knew what was the problem, I did verify the disk - no problems were indicated. Apple Support sent me a box to ship out my iPod. After many problems with DHL (I dropped it off at a drop box that was not in service), Apple finally received my iPod June 22. Yesterday it was reported that no problems were discovered with the iPod (yay!). Anyhow, on the night of the 25th, I realized that the MP3 drive would not mount after my server restarted from doing a long-over due 10.4.10 update. I connected the Drive to my laptop and ran disk utility. It produced the most error ridden log of 3 sequential attempts to repair the hard drive I’ve EVER SEEN (I saved the log to file). The log indicated that some files were lost but through some of that good Disk Utility magic, was able to be recovered. At this time I did not know if I lost any more files that Disk Utility was unable to recover. In any case, I decided I should back up the hard disk…so I did back it up to my video feeds hard drive. The back up consumed all but 1GB of the disk. On the night of the 26th, I then ran Disk Utility again on the drive and after reporting more (minor) errors it finally was indicated as being an OK disk. I reformatted the disk to really wipe it clean of any errors and start over. I restored the disk using the back up on the video feeds drive, then deleted the back up because I have more video feeds to go on that drive that would surely kill any of the remaining free space on there. The MP3 drive appeared to be working fine again. Later that night I attempted to connect to the drive over AFP. The server was being so slow for some reason I just gave up and went to bed. Last night (27th), after the server became faster, but then slower again, I went into the basement to reset it - thinking that somehow the 10.4.10 update ruined my AFP server. But bending over to reset it I heard a clicking sound coming from the MP3 drive. OH NO I thought. I tried to verify/repair the disk in Disk Utility again, but, after it failed even before it established that it was a HFS+ volume, it wouldn’t do it. Even though the data is still probably on the disk, I officially have no way of accessing that data. At times like these I wish I had a RAID set up just for data redundancy. My mind was blown away last night…I was like a zombie in the shock/horror of what just happened.
Last night I filled out some forms online to see how much a drive/data recovery place would charge me for recovering the data on there - so far I have not received any quotes. I also ordered a new 200GB HD to replace the now dead MP3 drive. I ordered shipping via UPS since USPS apparently doesn’t know how to ship stuff to our house (DBZ and wedding invitations still haven’t arrived). I was looking to upgrade the drive soon, but I was also looking for a good deal.
So what am I left with? 1) When I get my iPod back from repair (the records indicate that no repair was required, and that I should be getting my original iPod back), the iPod will be the most complete back up available - not the full mirror back up because of those 101+ songs that would not sync over, but the most complete back up I have. 2) I have about 60 songs on my desktop of songs I recently bought from the iTunes store in case any of the 66 song were any of the 101+ songs that didn’t sync up. 3) I have a CD in my car - some of those may be some of the 101+ songs…I don’t think so though. 4) I also have a full back up of the songs I had toward the end of 2005 - very old back up, since MUCH in my library has changed since then. I specifically was not doing back ups waiting for Mac OS X.5 to arrive to do the auto-backups for me in the background.
So here I am, I’ve been awake since 5:40am not able to go back to sleep worrying about my data too much (hence the title of this post modified from a FF album title (I thought it was appropriately creative)). I decided to blog about it thinking that maybe I’ll be able to return to sleep, but instead I’m just gonna go to work since my alarm will go off in a 1/2 hour.

So. A couple things have gone on in my life since my last post.
#1 is that I became an uncle. Uncle Brent. On May 21st, 2007 my sister April had a baby boy. Jenn and I ran up to Columbia, MD to see him, take pictures, and see how the parents were doing. Hehehe, kinda strange, April is a parent. But anyhow, his name is Lukas Crane Vega and he’s got lots of growing up to do. Apparently, He has my toes…and if anyone has seen my feet you know that means really long toes. But again, he’s got growing to do, so we’ll see if that’ll stay or not.
#2 is that my iPod of recent is gone. One day it just wouldn’t copy 101 songs over to the iPod because iTunes said it was in a format not supported by the iPod (I think 101 songs is the limit that the dialog box can hold). Strange how the music was standard MP3’s that worked on computer, was listed in Apple’s support documents as being supported by the iPods, and how I couldn’t even manually put the music on the iPod. So, Applecare told me to send it in. I dropped the DHL box off at a DHL drop box location one week ago. That was a mistake - now I have no receipt that says DHL accepted the box and will ship it. So, now if it gets lost in the mail (like things have been doing recently), I’ll be screwed and I’ll have to buy a new one. So, 3 months of the iPod life only to have it be taken away…again. Personally, I don’t think it was an iPod issue, I thought it was an iTunes one, but I though replacing the iPod would be a good first step in eliminating a potential variable with my syncing situation. Ironic how my 3rd Gen iPod had to be sent in about 6 months into the life I had with it.
#3 April 14th I turned 25. So, now it’s official - my age isn’t stopping me from doing anything - like renting cars now.