What good are sundials when the sun is gone?

If you know anything about my weird quirks/pet peeves, you probably know I HATE updating my iTunes. It's just annoying. I update it, and two days later they want me to update again, just so there's a border around the album art or something. Tell me what's so new and great and I might be sold on it, but otherwise just let me play my music! It's like asking someone to buy the new version of a textbook, so they shell out the bucks for it, and really it's the same thing plus one illustration (with different page numbers, of course, let's not make it easy for those who didn't shell out the bucks to follow along a-ha-ha, etc.).

Now don't get me wrong - I love Apple. I love Apple products. I'm a graphic designer, it's in the job description. I still prefer these (relatively painless) updates over anything Microsoft cooks up. 

But, well. The contents of my entire iPod were just erased. I'm past the point of being able to flip out (Post Traumatic Finals Disorder, perhaps), but...I just updated my iTunes yesterday. Last night, in fact. So now I'm sitting here, killing time while it loads...3050 items onto my iPod. Which is close to the amount of songs alone I had on there before (3305, yes I'm a nerd for knowing that, sue me), but this is including music, movies, TV shows, AND podcasts (again, nerd, I know). 

A lot of my music was erased from my iTunes in the Great Computer Catastrophe of Spring 2008 (My Windows computer's motherboard died, and being an idiot, I hadn't backed anything up). And it wasn't that huge of a deal, because all the music I liked was on my iPod. But now it is. Because it's all gone. It's hard to say how much I've lost. 300 odd songs, to be sure, but...probably a LOT more than that. My ballpark estimate is anywhere from 500-1,000.

And I'm thinking...this should not be. Unless a message pops up and says "Erase all contents on iPod?" with little  Yes (box) or No (box) options under it...THIS SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN!

I dunno. Maybe I'm just idiotic, and really should have thought to back up everything all the time everywhere in case of crap like this. This isn't a don't-trust-technology blog, don't worry. But learn from me, and keep things fool-proof safe unless you don't mind losing them.

End lesson.