The Importance of Backing Up Your Data

Thankfully this post has nothing to do with anything going wrong with this site (knock on wood), and everything to do with iTunes. As you might expect, with all of the Amazon music deals I've been posting, I've added a fair number of songs to my iTunes library lately. So you can imagine how upsetting it was when I installed an iTunes update last week, and as has happened before, it deleted my most recent library.

After While freaking out, I finished the Ralphs match ups, and after a (long) while, I discovered that I can change the library by pressing the shift button while opening iTunes - it prompts iTunes to ask me to choose a library.

Now here's the catch: You need to have a recent version of the library backed up somewhere to open.

The great, wonderful thing: I've recently gotten in the habit of backing up my files once a week onto an external hard drive. So I had a recent version of my iTunes library readily available. I was able to transfer that file to my hard drive, and then open it as my current iTunes library.

It was such a huge relief to not have to manually add songs and try to recreate playlists from memory - which would be all the worse because iTunes does not allow you to sync an iPhone without deleting stuff that's not on the computer.

So ... if you don't regularly back up your files, I highly recommend that you start doing so. You might even do as I do, and set up a weekly email reminder that it's time to back up your files. I actually send myself two such weekly emails - one to back up this site, and one to back up my hard drive. In addition to being able to restore data, it would be far easier to grab the external hard drive if we had to evacuate our house in an emergency - it has copies of our digital photos, music, and various documents so pretty much everything I would want anyway!

Now go back up your files ... I'll still be here when you're done :)