Well if you have them in your MP3 player, you CAN use ipod rip or some such program to yoink them back onto your computer. ..

(Not a proper use of "yoink" but I so like that word)

I have a shuffle only, and most of what was on there at the time of The Assumption was albums that I own on CD. Sigh.

And you gave me none of the assurance I requested, you dastardly man.

Well, in that case, you're hosed. It's hard to sugarcoat it. At least you still have your health.

Specklet, you're totally not an idiot. My husband has done this, and the kid who gave me 45gig of mp3s back when I first got a digital player managed to somehow do this, even with a 2 TERABYTE raid.

It happens. you forget to backup stuff and whoop, there it is.

danf, I highly approve of your evolutionary use of yoink. English is a fluid, living language dude. Besides the etymology suggests that it germinated as a soundalike for that cartoonish foley effect for when someone plucks out a hair or swipes something, so yea, that's appropriate

It's totally my fault. I could have warned you, but no, I couldn't be bothered. It's my bad. I feel terrible.

Perhaps I can help. What are you missing? ;)
For starters, here's your favorite song, right back in baby's arms now.

I can say with complete confidence that you're not a total idiot.

Jeez, thanks a whole lot, danf.

I can say with certainty that you are not an idiot, Specklet.

Here is some music to tide you over until you get your library up and running again.

Sophie B. Hawkins

Kathleen Edwards

Neil Young

I did the same thing a few years ago. Lost 200GB of music. Two years' worth of OiNKing and my entire CD collection - much of which I'd given away or sold, with the ha-ha assurance that I at least still had the music digitally. I invested in a nice data-recovery program, but it was only able to save a small percentage.

Oddly enough, it was that very incident which snapped me into a more relativistic view towards my material attachments. The whole "stuff is just stuff" argument was suddenly crystal-clear. I think I was still running on that frequency when I dumped 90% of my remaining possessions and made a long-threatened move from Boston to California.

The crash also woke me up from a long artistic slumber where I had slowly morphed from being a music producer to a music consumer. Having been jolted out of my collector reverie, I suddenly had lots of free bandwidth to resume making my own music. Within four months, I'd put out my first album in seven years.

Amazing what a little hard-drive crash can do for you...

mykescipark, that's the most inspiring account of a large-scale data loss that I've ever read. Here are a couple songs.

Aesop Rock - Commencement at the Obedience Academy

Betty Carter - You're Getting To Be A Habit

Yay Kathleen Edwards! Her new album sounds good on first spin. I think her voice has got a little smoother; either than or the production is better.

And, no, you're not a total idiot.

Well, you're still alive and there was no physical harm done to anyone, so no, you're not an idiot.

Yaaaaay I feel much more cheerful!

Yeah, I wouldn't know anything about losing all your music in an external hard drive. I hate those things with an unholy passion which I'm sure is undeserved but I know too many people now with too much missing music on external hard drives and the conspiracy theorist in me is starting to believe that they're all manufactured by RIAA.

This emphasizes how much i need to find a good external hard drive.
Someone recommend me a good mac compatible hard drive that isn't expensive.
Do i need more memory on the comp, too? i'm guessing yes, arg--

i have lost more to crashes and acts of god than most people have ever had or done, so it could have been so much worse.
Wow, just the music i never got to listen to... i wonder if this means i need an ipod.

If you don't have an iPod already, perhaps you could buy an mp3 player that's also a Mass Storage Device (Cowon and iRiver, among other manufacturers, make a bunch of these), thus killing two birds with one stone.

Eth, you can get a decent one for $100.

i want a complete walk through with a mac compatible gear head to figure out what memory i need for what as cheaply as possible with brand names and specific details.

With the windfall camera, i find i can't run anything and i guess memory, blah blah blah

eth: Go to ramseeker.com or crucial.com--tell 'em what kind of computer you have, and they'll tell you what type of RAM you need (that is, how many pins, how fast, how much capacity--don't worry about specific brand names). Then go to Newegg, and buy the cheapest option that doesn't have a bunch of negative reviews--it'll most likely be within a few bucks of the cheapest possible, and Newegg's customer service and whatnot is pretty good. That's probably how I'd do it, anyway. If you value your time and sanity, it might be the cheapest option.

The western digital external drives wore preformatted for the mac. That's what I use for my time machine backup.

box: Thanks, will they be able to help me pick out the best possible memory storage option for the poor as well?

Alas, no--those guys pretty much specialize in RAM.

You guys don't have to keep whispering, hijack away! *whuffles*

Ok, so someone got recommendations for the poor?
Unleash your gear head geekness and maybe handy tips for not losing stuff?

It's both funny and sad how a gig use to be so big and people could burn a single disc of important things to put in safety deposit boxes, ha-- oh, how life is all so funny and sad...

If it makes you feel better, a couple of years ago I lost everything except my music while restoring files from an external drive to my newly-reformatted PC. The files were copying back to the PC and one of the kids knocked the external drive off the edge of the desk. The data lost included almost every photo I had of all four of my kids.

I assure you that you aren't any kind of idiot, Specklet.

Oh, and I'd just like to say that Kathleen Edwards' husband/guitarist/producer is an old friend of mine. That's all. I'm cool, right?

richat, you know everyone. Kathleen Edwards' husband, shivers coyote. you're awesome.

more to the point: specklet, you're not an idiot. i recently backed up my drive, or rather, the boyfriend did it for me. but until then EVERYTHING i had was totally insecure. and i'm supposed to be writing a novel on this computer???

Whuffles to Specklet, for having to endure the travails heaped upon her by the PC industry. I sympathize... I've never lost my music collection, but I once lost several years of archived mail on the company mail server.... I even got to talk to the special techsupport queue at microsoft for people who had lost data during Exchange migrations.. kind of a grief counseling thing.

Eth (and everyone else newly interested in backing up your music): You almost assuredly do not need more RAM to go with a new external hard drive. A new HD might come with some bundled backup software on it that has silly memory requirements, but you don't have to use that software, and in fact most of the "shovelware" that comes like that is really lousy software. Hard disk storage and RAM memory are effectively two independent things.

So long as your computer was made after 1998 or so, it will have USB ports on it. The original USB is slow, but works ok for occasional backups. If yer box is from 2003 or later, it has USB 2.0 on it, which is much faster. There's no visual way to tell between 1.1 and 2.0, so guess based on the vintage of yer compy. Since I gather it's a Mac, it also has a thing called "Firewire" (which is Apple's name for something called "IEE 1394", they are the same). So you get your choice of methods to attach the new drive - USB 2.0 is best, then Firewire/1394, and lastly USB 1.1.

The other (minor, not critical, don't sweat it) consideration is this: There are two basic physical sizes of hard drive - known as the "form factor". There's the big 3.5" kind generally used in desktop PCs, and the smaller 2.5" kind used in laptops. The big ones tend to hold more data and be cheaper, but you need to plug them into the wall. The small ones are lighter, slower, quieter, and can be run from the power in the USB ports. Unless you drag yer laptop everywhere and want an especially portable hard disk, or are really hurting for electrical socket space, you probably will be happier with a full-size 3.5" form-factor disk.

Finally - Don't sweat the whole "Mac vs PC" format thing. It doesn't matter; these days stuff just works. Disk is Disk is Disk. Whatever the computer needs to do to see the disk it will do in the background when you first plug the new device in.

With some quick searching, the Buffalo "DriveStation" brand looks respectable, although I have no first-hand experience w/ it. Buffalo has been around for a long time, unlike a number of the other brands on NewEgg. The 500 Gb capacity for $150 is a better deal than the 160 Gb for $125, but they're both fine choices. There are a few choices in the sub-$100 range, but that's below my comfort threshold.

Thanks, triode. i meant i may need more RAM anyway, not because i need a hard drive.
*does potential math for wishful shopping of needful things*

You want to hear something really idiotic: well, listen up: Here I am, sitting on my computer, which is totally fucked up, it's got viruses up the wazoo, and I've still not bothered to get it fixed. This has been an ongoing affair for the last one year. I've been postponing the inevitable until one of two things happen--either the computer dies on me completely, or I get enough confidence in my computing ability that I actually try and reboot the damn thing on my own. The latter option is a scary proposition, since if I can't get it back online I'll be stuck without an internet connection and that is one thought I would not like to entertain. So, here I sit, on one of the worst chairs in the world (the other one was even worse, if you can believe that, since it broke a couple of times, and then finally again a few days ago, only this time it ended up taking a bit of my thigh along with it--a big scratch that freaked my mom out), and now I'm sitting in this awkward hunched position, typing quickly because the minute I slow down the cursor gets stuck and I have to wait for awhile until it starts blinking again. Not to mention the occasional automatic shutdown right in the middle of a post or download, which really peeves me out. Oh, and the constant banging on the top of the monitor, whenever the screen goes all fuzzy.

So, Speck--if you want to talk about idiotic behaviour--you're looking at the king right here.:)

that should be enough to not make you feel like a total idiot, right?

Specklet, you're not even a partial idiot.