Save All Data!

Recently, my external hard disk died. It just did. I'm not sure how, because the previous time I used it, it was fine. Apparently my sister did use it before I discovered that it had a problem, so something must have happened during then. All my music, books, comics, shows, PSP games, PC games, movies, photos were all gone, just like that. Years worth of stuff collected and kept nicely in my hard disk, all gone. I felt like those parent who raised his kid from young, just to see the kid die in some freak accident. It tears your heart and all is lost. What's even better is that sites like Megaupload and Fileserve were disappearing, meaning that obtaining all my stuff would prove difficult.

My biggest worry was my music. My iTunes takes its music from my external HDD directly, as I did not want to store my songs in my computer. The size was too much, and I feared that storing my music in the computer would cause it to lag. Now, with the HDD gone, how was I going to get my songs? All my songs in my iPhone would be gone the next time I synced it with iTunes. Does that mean I should never sync it forever? And then it dawned upon me: my last salvation for my music was my iPhone. Stored inside was another copy of of all my music, and that was my best chance to restore my music library!

So I spent an entire night trying various programs that would export all my stuff from my iPhone to my computer. Took me a lot of tries, but just went I was on the verge of giving up, I found a program that answered my prayers. So I downloaded the program, and wanted to transfer it to my laptop via thumbdrive. But somehow, all external devices were write-protected suddenly and I couldn't! So I slowly transferred from my computer to my laptop via Dropbox, which took really long.

*Apparently, I went to change some setting to make that write-protected nonsense, but I managed to solve that issue today^^*

With that program, I managed to save all my songs, except that some of them needed to be edited in iTunes. That settled the music, next was my shows.

Fortunately for me, my old HDD was still working, and in it was quite a lot of my stash of shows, except for recent ones. This helped to soften the blow of the loss of my HDD.

Then I have another source I could tap on to get back my data: friends. I've been sharing stuff like my shows , books and comics to them, so in a way they have a copy of what I lost. That way, I could get them to send me those stuff and in a way salvage more of my data!

Really, Western Digital just ruined my collection. Plus, they charge $800+ to try to retrieve all my data, which my friend already checked and said that all my data were gone already. No way am I spending so much on all the stuff I got for free!

At least, to some extent, crisis averted.