NP: Bob Mould, Body of Song

I continue to exist in a weird technological hell this week, and it's my own damn fault.

You know how everyone everywhere always says that you should continually scan hard disks for errors, defragment them, and back them up? Well I've got about 100GB worth of data on an external drive that I thought was somewhat invulnerable, and now I may be paying for it.

Among other fun things on this drive are about 5,000 MP3 files, a bunch of TiVo recordings, the recent logfile history of notabbott.com, and quite possibly all the support files for my digital audio. The not-terribly-amusing thing about the latter two is that they were on my second hard drive on my old machine, and I had parked them on the external drive as part of the migration to the new machine. I just never brought them all the way over.

As you've probably guessed, the drive is out of warranty. By about six weeks. I'll refrain from yelling real loud about the manufacturer for now, but I'm not terribly happy with them, particulary considering how they were dismissive when I raised concerns while I was still under warranty and having what seemed to be unrelated problems.

Anyway, I started backing up my MP3 collection a month or so ago when I incorrectly diagnosed the problems I was having as the external drive instead of the internal drive, but I only got about halfway through. That said, between those backups and my iPod, I can probably salvage a lot of the music.

If you've had good experiences with anyone on data recovery, particularly local to Chicago, let me know in the comments. I was fortunate enough to run into someone at a BBQ over the weekend who knew somebody, so I'll be calling him forthwith.

The other source of never-ending tech hilarity is my decision to switch to IMAP from POP with the hosting switch. It's not so much that it's a problem, but it's different, and I have to learn the ins and outs of how IMAP is different when I've got much bigger fish to fry.