Conversations #2: Back-up, baby, back-up

I have items in my iPod that I copied or borrowed from other people so I'm very finicky about backing up the contents of my iPod to make sure that the items I copied from others will not be lost should anything happen to my iPod.

Note that my iPod is on its 6th year and it has been in use nearly 24/7 for the past 5 years. For the ones keener on details and times, yes, my iPod's age also reflects the length of time my husband and I have been in a relationship.

I have a habit of naming my gadgets. I got it from one of my Heart Sisters, Toni, and have since found that it is not only cute but useful. We have household help and when they mistakenly put cords and wires away without me knowing, it's easier to say "Look for [insert name here]." rather than "Look for [describe cord type]."

My iPod's name is Destiny. There are two reasons for this, the first one being we'd just finished watching Gundam SEED Destiny at the time she--yes, I consider my iPod to be female--was bought, and second, it really did feel like everything had naturally fallen into place when we became a couple.

Dee is a 30G iPod video and at the time I felt like there was no way I could fill up all that space. But years go by, CDs are bought, mp3s are passed around and to my surprise, I soon found that I actually had to remove songs, sometimes albums, from her memory and return them to my harddrive. (Note: There are many ways of doing this but I'll leave it to you to research how. Google is your friend.)

Segue into the death of Mnemosyne.

Mnemosyne was my first laptop. She was an IBM Thinkpad R51e bought on sale in the summer of 2006 for about 72,000PhP. If you click on the link you'll see why she went so cheaply though I do wonder why the R series is not on the Wikipedia list. And if you want to know more about Mnemosyne just click on the name for the Wikipedia entry.

Over nearly four years of use and abuse, Mnemosyne's memory board crashed leaving me in tears at the loss of such a good technological friend and then wondering what to do with her parts.

Here is where Dee's story and Mnem's intertwine:

With Mnem's passing, I began to fear for the possible loss of Dee and all her contents. Unfortunately, the only external harddrive I had at the time, a Maxtor One-Touch 60G I named Dorian Gray, was also fast becoming unreliable--Mnem, Digger (Dorian's nickname), and Dee were all the same age, and Mnem and Digger received the most abuse.

I agonized over the loss for a few weeks before I had my light bulb moment.

I brought Mnem to the shop to have her harddrive, collectively known as Cassandra (though when partitioned, Cassandra is the C drive and Penelope is the D drive). Her internal memory, which seemed so big then, was actually only 40G, just 10G over Dee's internal memory.

I've spent the past few days reorganizing my files. This is why I haven't really been blogging (leaving several series hanging, my apologies) these days; I've found it more necessary to get my documents in order because I just discovered that I have at least two copies of the same file between Clio's hard drive, Hestia, and Tristan and a total of 30G of free space. Yes, a mere 30G of free space when Hestia has 320G and Tristan is worth 500G.

You might be wondering why.

The reason is that I've only just found out how I could reliably extract the contents of my iPod to Hestia. What those are I'll leave you to research for yourself but I've been told that the current most reliable way is to use Senuti.

And so from the already unreliable Digger to today's "Head meet Desk" conversation care of that pretty little girl on the right

  

All the mp3s from Dee are backed up to that pretty little number there. I named her a few months ago but apparently my husband had conveniently forgotten her name.

Me: I'm surprised that you're not reacting to my saying [name].

Him: What?

Me: You used to get really annoyed whenever I say [name]. You know, the back-up harddrive for Dee's contents?

Him: *head cradled in his hands* And you just had to remind me. Thanks.

The mystery name? If Destiny is the source of the harddrive's contents, do you think you can guess what her child would be called? (The clue is right there.)

Enjoy!