I love my iPod. I’ll admit it. It’s probably the coolest little geeky gadget that I’ve ever had.And very recently, I found out how very dependant I am on it…

Flash back to a couple of months ago….my wonderful old workhorse Gateway laptop started running slow. REALLY slow. Being the geek squad that we are at our house, Jonathan and I started running some diagnostics on it to see what the problem was. After an evening of defragging, and file cleanup, we decided to check the hard drive for errors and realized…oh duh, the hard drive is 89% full. But of what…I was stumped. Then I looked down at my scratched iPod and realized…oh…20GB of my 30GB hard drive was being taken up by music.

I decided to move my music to Jonathan’s laptop since he has a much larger hard drive in the hopes of speeding up my poor little Gateway. We had some network problems in our house and it was getting late, so I figured I’d just restore everything using SharePod later, and deleted all the music from my Gateway.

I went to bed…promptly forgot….and left my 20GB of music on my iPod, unsynced to any computer.

Flash forward to last week. I was charging my iPod at work. I disconnected it from the computer and it was dead. I about nearly freaked out. It might not seem like a big deal to you to lose 20GB of music, but this really was most of my music collection. I’ve gotten rid of a lot of CD’s in the past two years and took advantage of a few iTunes gift cards so I had a lot of music that was not on any hard drive that I thought was gone and lost forever.

What was I going to listen to in the car? All of those playlists? All of the veggie tales that keep Claire sane….

Then I took a deep breath and came back to reality (after moping about it for a while and calling Jonathan to whine). I just needed to reset it and although the music was gone, it was still working. Phew.

Most of my music was on my brother’s computer. I forgot that I copied nearly everything over to his portable hard drive months before.

Yesterday I hooked my non-dead iPod back to my trusty Gateway and transferred all the music back from my brother’s portable hard drive.

What this has to do with my family…very little. I just wanted to make a word to the wise that if you have an iPod…back it up. It’ll save you lots of heartache.