Administration


If I had to save one thing from a house, it would undoubtedly be my 500GB Hard drive. Though the hard drive doesn’t necessarily know it, it truly is, my life. Every piece of music I love, every photograph I have ever taken, and everything I have ever written sits on that hard drive. It’s only 500GB. Costs about £60 to £100, depends upon who you buy it from. I’m not particularly good at backing up - though I have several other drives around the house, and this perhaps, is my undoing.

My son also loves Futurama. Ama! Ama! He squeals and coos as he treats the house as his own, personal, playground, to crawl and climb in the pursuit of the elusive Futurama 15DVD Box Set that sits on a high shelf. For some reason, he identifies closely with this 12-rated, rather mature, animated series about life in the future. He likes it more than The Simpsons. My mother said The Simpsons was rubbish, because it was a cartoon. I almost pointed out that The Beatles were just a bunch of noise, but perhaps successfully, bit my tongue.

Whilst I was at work, X decided to play a new game called Indiana Jones Climbs The Mountain To Reach The DVD Box Set. It’s a game I’ve occasionally played myself. According to legend, myth, and minor bylines in The Onion, In his quest for this elusive, shiny animated prize, he somehow managed to cause great tragedy to befall me.

The Hard Drive - all my precious 120GB of smut, and the as precious 300GB of music, and the priceless pictures of my life over the past five years, came crashing down akin to Fonthill Abbey. It probably held itself with perfect grace and poise in air for a few silent seconds, motionless as Wile E Coyote, a paper bird at the apex of flight. And then, without just cause, the hard drive came crashing down with a dull clunk onto the floor.

From now on, I’m storing hard drives on the floor, or inside vaults backed up every damn day. According to my rough calculations, I lost around 650 naked women in that disk crash.

Alongside around 30,000 MP3’s and around 30,000 photographs.



Luckily, I have almost all the data backed up somewhere. I powered up my previous desktop, last used in anger on 8th October 2007, and recopied over all my MP3’s from the Hard Drive there. Luckily - I suppose - the rest of my MP3’s were also stored on my iPod. By use of some fairly cheeky ferreting in hidden system files and folders - I took all these 29,782 MP3’s back and reinstalled on the hard drive. I also recopied over all my smut, and all the photographs and my writing.

As I said, I’ve probably lost around 650 naked women. Not the end of my world. Its not as easy as just picking up and dumping MP3’s back into place, mind you. ITunes has this frustrating option, where by it stores artists by multiple categories. Not only do I have to take every MP3 from the ‘Individual Artist’ folder, I also have to recover from the ‘Compilations’ section., where the songs are sorted by album title, not by album artist. As you can imagine, this is probably a TV Season DVD Box Set’s worth of effort. Nonetheless, I endure. I have yet to complete it for a relatively simple reason.

Disk space. By copying the entire contents of my 120GB drive and my 250GB drive and my 160GB iPod, you can see that I am approximately 30GB over my 500GB capacity. Luckily, I have around 40GB of duplicates across my original system folders. You with me? Good. But I have to root out the 40GB duplicates, and recopy them over to their associated artist folders. What a pain in the Gulliver. Nonetheless, needs must. By my calculations, after I’ve gone through all this, I’ve lost around 650 pictures of naked women I found on the internets and the Googles.

There’s another drawback. On my iPod, as indeed, most iPods, files are sorted in a rather haphazard manner. It may look completely normal and well sorted when you click through iTunes, or the iPod click wheel, but it isn’t. Instead of what one would deem a common sense approach to file storage (that is, sorting files by the following structuture : F:My iPod/Music/Name of The Artist / Name Of The Album / Name Of The Song, the iPod is, in its uniquely Mac way, sorted rather differently. On the iPod all your MP3’s are renamed. No long is a song called “How Soon Is Now.MP3”, or “Welcome To The Jungle.MP3”. Each song is entitled something different. A typical example would be a four digit alphabetical string in each one of 49 different system files.

For example, your copy of “Angels” by Robbie Williams - and I know they come preloaded on every iPod, by Law, under the little known 1998 Guy Chambers Omnipresence Act of Parliament, Section 3.IV.14, is actually stored as a file that looks roughly like this :

Now strap yourselves in for the torrent of pointlessness,..

F:/MyiPod/Users/System files/Hidden/Music//F47/HYIK(2).mp3

Not only that, but you have to go into Tools>Options to even show the Hidden files. What I have spent time doing recently is extracting each of these renamed files to a ‘master folder’. The drawback is that in each folder there are probably 48 files that share the same, random 4 digit alphabetical string as in A.N.Other Folder. So in F03 there is HYIK.mp3. In F09 there is HYIK.mp3 - now know as HYIK(2).mp3. And in F17 there is a HYIK.mp3 that is now renamed HYIK(3).mp3.

With me? Good.

The stage I am now at is resorting these 29,872 files to folders inside the main music folder by Music / Artist Name / Album Name and then ensuring that the correctly tagged files (of which there are 8,000 on my old hard drive) are then filed in preference over the HYIK.mp3 files.

Fun. But at least it has taught me one thing. No, not, Back Up Your Hard Drive, but simply this : Never Work With Children Or Hard Drives*

*not strictly true.
- posted by Mark @ 7:00 pm