losin’ stuff…

 

 

now playing: bruce hornsby, “jack straw” (from deadicated)

 

first of all, that’s a great version of that song…with a kickass guitar solo from one of my heroes, george marinelli, from his days with bruce’s band, the range. george also did all the guitar work on charlie degenhart’s album, bridge street main, so i got the opportunity in charlie’s band to recreate his parts live. quite a kick.

rachel had a fatal crash on her computer and lost some pretty important data over the weekend…including a bunch of her notes for a book she’s working on and her notes for some of her freelance work.

kinda plants a rock in your gut, just thinking about it.

a couple of years ago, when i was installing removable hard drive bays in a couple of my machines at home, i had put the disk drive that had my entire MP3 collection (which, as it stood at that time, was around 4000 files) into one of the removable drive bays in my computer upstairs in the studio, and it proceeded to rename every single file on the drive to something like this:

*&(^&*!TKJB#&*^&,OIBN@(*&$

every one of them. 4000 files named “gibberish”.

what did i do, you might ask?

well, after the paramedics left and my therapist managed to coax me out of the fetal position and i stopped sucking my thumb and gently singing to myself, i had to go through each and every file – all 4000 of them – right click on them and select “open with” and point them towards winamp to get them to open, since the file extension had been wiped out. since they were MP3 files, winamp recognized them as such and would play them back…so i had to listen to them and then close winamp (because you can rename the file if it’s in use) and then rename the file to what it was to begin with…provided i knew what it was (which wasn’t the case for a handful of them, believe it or not).

so, take that process and multiply it by 4000+, and you’ve got roughly two weeks of time spent recovering from a data disaster that, in all honesty, could have been much,much worse.

there was an ad that i saw a long time ago that left an impression on me – the headline said “there are two kinds of people that you meet in this world – those who have lost data, and those who will.”

scary stuff, if you think about it….get out those CDR’s and start backin’ up your stuff, if you don’t do so regularly. if you have a ton of stuff, there are companies that make small (and somewhat affordable) backup servers with hundreds of GB’s of storage space on them that you can either attach directly to your PC or to a home network…i’m thinking about getting one of those myself…once i lose something else and spend a few more hours in the fetal position….