In a previous post, I raved about being able to bring my video iPod with me, and the TV shows that I always watch so that I can watch these shows whenever I wanted and not when they were on TV.
It was fantastic all the way up to the point at which the external hard drive which held all my iTunes library crashed in a big way.
Well, how nice of Apple to not let us re-download the stuff we bought. Where is the promise of digital media and the ability to not have physical media but being able to access it anywhere? Guess it doesn’t work with the economics. After all, Apple could make money on all the people who blow up their hard drives and can’t re-download their stuff.
I for one am glad that I buy CDs and rip them into iTunes. My music I can recover with difficulty; it was fortunate that I have a backup of my iTunes directory but unfortunately it is many months old. I can re-rip the CDs but I can’t re-download the 2-3 albums I did buy through iTunes.
But all the recent TV shows I subscribed to – all gone. PFFT. Kaput. Nada.
Now maybe it’s OK. I probably wouldn’t have watched them again anyways. Still, it sucks. Those little bytes of data which made up those videos are gone forever because Seagate didn’t make a drive that lasted long enough.
So where are the indestructible drives? As the world goes more digital, we have need for storage that should outlast ourselves. But yet nobody is making anything like that. They just say you should backup. Wonderful. I believe the technology is out there to create the indestructible hard drive but they just won’t because otherwise they’d be out of business because they can’t sell more hard drives for all the people who crash them.
What can I do? I’m going to try to extract all the music from my iPod via some bootleg programs and at least see if I can recover a lot of my music. The videos are pretty much gone though.
I went and bought two 750 GB hard drives and now am going to have to be religious about backing up TWICE. So now for security, this wonderful digital media is costing me many hundreds of dollars more just so I can make sure they won’t disappear on me again.
What’s the probability of both hard drives self-destructing at the same time?
I don’t want to know.