Because I haven’t learned my lesson the last time I crashed a hard drive, I have yet another sob story for you. Sit down.

I recently bought a new SSD drive, which should be cause for celebration: fast, quiet, all that jazz. But it’s only 120gb, since those buggers are still pretty pricey.

I begin moving data from my boot drive to an extra drive I found in a drawer. The Post-it note said “blank” and I assumed all was well. Over 300gb of “really important stuff” was uprooted and moved.

And then it stopped working.

This means that most of my life from the past year is now dead. And, again, my entire collection of music. This last happened in 2007 and I had the same reaction – nothing! I’m numb.

There are recovery programs out there. I run one, which recovers 100,000 files. Each file is rendered anonymous, dumped in new folders without proper filenames. All of my JPEG pictures now read like binary code.

The music seems to be slightly better off; some of the filenames survived, along with most of the ID3 tags. So, in interest of getting things usable again, I turned to iTunes’ organizational tools. I normally hate letting iTunes move my files around, but I’ll let it go to town on this. 1,000 files now moved and sorted (quite a few incorrectly.) It’s as if I cut the DNA bonds between artists; there is Bach growing out of The Crystal Method.

I (may) have learned my lesson. Backup. Please hold me to it.

In other news, my credit card number was stolen this past month. Stop doing that.