If I were to provide one piece of advice to computer users, it would be to always have a backup of your data. I can't speak for Windows, but on Macs anyway, it's super easy and convenient. Just buy and plug in an empty external hard drive and Time Machine will automatically do periodic backups of your data. With Time Machine, it even does
hourly backups for the past day (then after a day, it only keeps one a day for the past week and then one a week). It's easy to think that you'll be fine and never need a backup, but you'll never know when something will happen and you'll be extra glad that you have that backup, and happy you spent the money on that extra hard drive.
Like if you accidentally delete every album in your music library that starts with the letter "T". Which just happened to me. And yes, that includes "The" as well. One click in the wrong place and it was gone. All gone. Not just the entries in the iTunes library but the actual audio files on the hard drive themselves, too. That's over 60 albums total.
After a moment of panic and frustration that I could have done something so stupid I remembered my backup and began the restoration process. It was 7:40 and my last backup was at 7:06. I'd lose about half an hour's worth of the library cleanup and updating that I had been doing, but it sure beats the considerable effort of rebuilding that part my library that would have been required had I not had a backup handy. Sure, iTunes now lets you re-download old purchases, but not all my music came from iTunes. A significant amount of it is still from old CDs that I would have had to take the time re-ripping (not to mention digging through the boxes in my closet to find them all first), and a bunch came from other digital music stores that I couldn't re-download them from. Plus, I'd lose all the play counts and last played dates. I really like having statistics like that.
And the really crazy thing is that I recently signed up for iTunes Match so I could have re-downloaded every one of those albums (most of which I was going to re-download anyway, so I could get them in higher quality that way) except that, when I deleted it all, I had also checked off the “Also delete these items from iCloud” box. That wasn't an error, since I had intended to check that. The problem was that instead of having one song selected, somehow the entire playlist got selected.
So, to restore my library there were two places I had to go using Time Machine. First was the Music\iTunes folder under my home directory. There were a number of iTunes Library files there that needed restoring. Fortunately, those were small and restored quickly. But then I needed to restore my audio files. I decided the simplest thing would be to restore the entire Music folder. Sure, it meant 65GB of data and 40 minutes of time, but it was far easier, and probably quicker as well, to restore everything than to go through each individual artist subfolder to see if there were albums missing, and restoring just those albums.
After waiting for everything to get restored, I was very glad to see that the process worked perfectly, and all my "T" albums were back and the handful of tracks I played at random did indeed play. Three cheers for backups! Now tomorrow I had better remember to bring home my “off-site backup” hard drive from work so I can update that one too.
