Please note that all blog posts before 8 April 2007 were automatically imported from LiveJournal. To see the comments and any LiveJournal-specific extras such as polls and user icons, please find the source posting at http://brianenigma.livejournal.com/2006/08/Sunday, I missed out on Mondo Croquet. I was no longer sick, but I was also pretty far from being completely well. As an event that would assuredly end in drinking (and I could assume probably started with some amount of drinking), I didn't feel that I could pull it off while coughing up chunks of lung butter.
Another thing happened Sunday. July 30th 2006 shall henceforth be known as The Great Music Purge of 2006. You see, I have a lot of music files. They all sit on an external 100G drive that iTunes uses. It just so happens that this gets backed up to a second external 100G drive — you know, in the event of a disaster and all that. It's not an off-site backup, so won't help in the event of a fire, but will certainly suffice in the event of a hardware failure or a fat-finger accidental delete.
I got this really cool new file vault the other week. The network attached storage is perfect for that kind of backup. It's 1 terabyte of hard drives. I have it set up as RAID-1 mirrors, so I “only” have 500 megs — I could have gotten more space by configuring it as a RAID-5, but then I lose the convenience factor of being able to pop out a drive and hook it up to any computer. Saturday, I figured I would do a manual backup of the iTunes music to that network drive. After everything was copied that first time, I could set up a great little rsync script to synchronize just the incremental changes.
Fast-forward to Sunday. I check on the copy progress and it seems to have halted somewhere around artists beginning with the letter “D.” Further investigation shows that the disk is no longer visible on the computer and seems to be in a sleep state. A reset of the computer and drive don't change this fact. No problem — there's probably something wrong with the drive enclosure. Yank out the drive, put it in another enclosure. Same thing. Crap. I can't hear the drive spinning when it powers up. Well, it's probably a hardware failure.
I'll just use the backup. This is exactly the reason why I have a backup. Hmmm… where's the backup? Oh yeah. Crap. Remember the laptop deletion fiasco from the other week? Yeah. I sort of borrowed the iTunes backup drive, deleted all the music, and replaced it with what I could salvage from the laptop. There's no more backup.
At this point, I am trying to laugh at the irony (using the Alantis Morisette definition) that the iTunes drive died in the process making a backup as a safety in the event of the drive dying, but not having much success.
So basically, what I have is this: (1) all artists between A..C and some from D (2) the 55-or-so gigs I favored enough to put on the iPod and (3) whatever I can scrounge from various audio and data CDs around the house. I am pretty certain that most of the anthologies that I rarely/never listen to anyway are gone (e.g. the entire Beatles back catalog, a whole bunch of classic rock, etc.), but if I rarely or never listened to it, will it really be missed?
At this point, I am basically trying to figure out what I still have, what I no longer have, and what I don't have but can't live without.
