It was a grim day in August of 2010. The birds stopped chirping, the sun sank behind the clouds, and there was wailing in the streets. My laptop computer, which safely housed my music library of nearly 10,000 songs, crashed. It was an indescribable feeling of loss when I recalled the hundreds of CDs that I meticulously transferred onto the computer, one by one, organizing by genre and artist, and now they were all gone. Not to mentioned the hundreds of dollars worth of downloaded music. To make matters worse, I had recently given all my hard copies of CDs away. Who needs to lug those old-fashioned things around when everything fits so nicely onto the computer? And so every CD I had ever purchased since my very first one in junior high (the Evita soundtrack), was gone forever.
We rushed the machine to the emergency room – the Apple store in the mall – but it was no use. Nothing could be recovered. Months went by and I tucked my grief away, not letting myself contemplate the enormous loss and the prospect of having to start over. Until one day in the not so distant past, I discovered something hidden in the closet. A miracle. A savior. A hard drive.
It turns out that all those months and years of nagging Eddie to back-up the laptop had apparently worked! He had backed everything up about a year ago. And with relief, I discovered that instead of a decade of music being lost, it was only about 7 months. Phew!!!
Today I began the painstaking process of re-organizing the 21.23 GB of music, for although they had been saved, they were in a shambled mess in iTunes. It will take weeks, maybe months, to sort out, rebuild, and reshape my digital music library, but I only feel relief and gratefulness as I go through each song title one by one. I’ve learned two valuable lessons from this near catastrophe. First, always back up. Second, nagging works!
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