Me vs. The External Hard Drive

My music files and photo files were taking up something like 97% of the memory of my computer's hard drive (no, I'm not exaggerating), and since my computer is my WORK computer and my personal stuff was jeopardizing all of the work files I had, I figured I'd better bite the bullet and get an external hard drive to transfer all of my music and photos on to. My entire laptop has 30GB of memory. The new external hard drive? 200GB.

Isn't it pretty?

So I get this thing, not having a clue what to do or how to install it, and rather than bring it in to work and let my friendly neighborhood technogeeks assist me, I wanted to do it all myself.

Getting the drive itself up and running was no biggie. Transferring the picture files over. Piece o'cake. But the whole iTunes/music files transfer? Another story.

See, to save space on my laptop, what I would do is go into my music files and delete the MP3s, but keep the song info in my iTunes. That way, when I'd update my iPod, it would "trick" the iPod into thinking the music was still there, and it wouldn't automatically delete the songs. Well, the iTunes had its revenge for all of my shenanigans.

When I transferred the iTunes over to my new e-drive, I lost nearly 3,000 songs--roughly half of the music I'd loaded in from CDs. Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! I have spent the better part of the past two weekends reloading stuff...one...CD...at...a...time. Annoying? Oh yeah.

And the other dumb thing I did? I transferred the iTunes program over...not just the music files (which is what I should've done). So now, I have to lug my e-drive to and from work with me if I want to play my iTunes or listen to iTunes radio at work. Which I do. Because I can't stand listening to "office noise" and my noise-cancelling headphones with AC/DC blaring in them is the only thing that keeps me moderately sane in the heart of Cubeland, U.S.A.

Lesson learned: Always, ALWAYS ask the technogeeks for assistance.