Back up your hard drive

[ReCycled]

You guessed it - my hard drive crashed. Made a nasty scraping sound as it spun down to it's state of rigor mortis. It was 7 years old and had been giving me warning signs. Anyway, I wasn't that sad over what I had lost, because most of my personal stuff had been copied to my laptop when i bought that one. But.....I had a ton of music in there. A ton. So much so that I was running on less than 10 gig free space on a 250 gig HD most of the time. I would delete old programs and junk just to free up more space for new mp3s.

So I lost 15 years of steady accumulation of music. I had every song/album that I cared about from every decade back to the 50s. I had replaced inferior mp3s with higher bit-rate or superior sounding ones. I had obscure stuff that rarely gets posted or perhaps can not even be found anymore. And I had a huge collection of Jazz. I painstakingly had amased the best classic ones  (Miles, Coltrane etc) and a lot of great other artists and some contempary ones also. I had literally 1000's of albums. All gone. The shop tried many things to get it to read but all failed. In fact the corrupt HD was causing a good machine to have problems.

I've started to tediously replace the classic pop stuff and it's been fairly easy because of all the decade compilation albums around. I use my Newsgroup rather than peer-to-peer sharing. So I'm at the mercy of whatever happens to get posted. I'm also at the mercy of getting today's version of an mp3. A song copied from a re-mastered collection that is absolutely maxed for volume and many times is distorted. I rarely had that problem with my older ones since that practice wasn't as pervasive as today. I listened to a newer copy of Kashmir and it was awful. Everything is mush. Drums are indistinct. It's hard to tell it's stereo even - sounds like a mono cut. I guess people nowadays do not understand fidelity - just volume. Or they don't care.

The Jazz is a worse problem. No one is posting the old common classics. There's no need. Everyone that wanted it - has it. Long ago. Who would post "Kind of Blue" today? Or Brubeck's "Take 5"? Anyone serious about jazz has at least 3 versions of it. The only thing I'm seeing posted is rare live performances of artists at some club somewhere. Probably the only thing left for the music industry to release in that genre as they scour their archives. Often it's inferior sound with inferior performances.
Sigh....

So kids....back up your hard drive. Porn is repacable. Some music isn't or will take you a very long time to duplicate.
 

 

[Th0m@s29]

NEVER EVER!! I am far too coool to do that!