Musical Maladies

When the hard drive in my PC died a few months ago there were a few things on it that were lost forever. With two more internal hard drives and three further external hard drives holding the bulk of my data, most of the missing files were unimportant and their absence hasn't bothered me.

All of my music was safe and sound but unfortunately my iTunes 'library' was on the deceased storage device. At first this doesn't seem like a great loss, a quick reinstall of iTunes and a couple of hours reimporting the tracks and I'm good... right?

While all my songs are still there, it's the little pieces that are missing which are really felt. Losing playlists, ratings and play counts makes a library of over 8,000 songs nearly unmanageable. The way I selected which tracks to squeeze into the 32 Gb of space on my iPod Touch revolved mainly around ratings and play counts, now I'm wading though a haystack looking for record needles.

The only other casualties were a few apps which weren't on my iPod at the time of the crash. At £6 each it's frustrating but not life altering. All in all I'm now back up and running with very little pain.

Now if I could only figure out how to stop it happening again?