Hard drive failure
I guess it was time. I bought my first computer in 1986 and since that time I've never experienced a hard drive failure. Till now. I brought my iMac to the Apple Store this morning and they confirmed what I suspected. My iMac will be ready on Thursday with a brand-new spanking-clean hard drive.
I'm pretty well backed up on everything. Most recent work (except for an essay I was writing for my professional blog) is on .Mac; other stuff on my iPod or backup DVDs. The only thing I decided NOT to keep backed up is my iTunes library. I don't buy from the iTunes store; we have a huge CD collection and selections from that were in my iTunes library - so I guess in one sense it was backed up - in that I can restore those from the original CDs.
It's going to take some time to put everything back together (including reinstalling apps) but it's also a chance to start over with a clean drive. In the mean time, I'll be using my trusty little 12" PowerBook.
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Comments
The iTunes software doesn't access your hard drive constantly, but it does it often enough that the drive is kept "spun up". So if you run iTunes for a couple hours, your hard drive is running for a couple hours, ie much MUCH more than it would be otherwise. For that reason, a good idea is to keep your iTunes library on an external drive, so that it's a 150 dollar 80 gig LaCie or FireLyte drive that's kept running constantly, rather than the mothership's hard drive. I've got two of these little buggers now and use the second, older one as a backup to the primary one.
And once my iTunes library went past about 30 gigs, I started burning it onto DVDs about once every six months. It's an incredible amount of time to reconstruct an iTunes library. In my case, too, I've sold all the actual CDs to Amoeba, so it would be incredibly expensive to have to replace it.