thefluteboy

The world of DJing has changed radically over the years. Once upon a time, you had two great lumbering record decks, and cases of heavy vinyl records to carry. Then CDs came and lightened the load for us. Eventually the computer would find its rightful place in the DJ's setup. With laptops getting ever more smaller and faster, it is very tempting to put your trust and faith in the laptop's ability to run the show.

I personally cannot bring myself to DJ with just the laptop. Considering I have been buying CDs since 1988, and have quite a back catalogue to turn to, this would be foolish. Coupled also with the fact that a laptop can FAIL, it would be just irresponsible. As I discovered last Tuesday when trying to add new music to the work laptop. No power. Nothing. Dead. A defunct laptop. But not to worry - I can remove the hard drive and dump its contents onto the main computer. This I tried, only to discover the hard drive was in fact dead. With 18,000 songs on it.

In this digital age we are reminded frequently of the need to back up our data. Not just because of hard drive breakdowns, but also because of those beloved "ransomware" programs that kindly encrypt all of your files, and then demand a good three-figure sum in order to retrieve them. With digital storage being relatively cheap, it is foolish to not back up your important digital content. What a shame I did not have a backup of all 18,000 of those songs. a collection that has taken six years to compile, and much money to purchase. All those vinyl tracks lovingly restored and transferred to the digital domain.

Coming by a new laptop was not tricky at all. That 2010 Toshiba has been replaced by a 2016 HP, and just that has realised an increase in speed. Only trouble is that dead drive with all that damn music on it! Yes I had CDs to fall back upon, but with modern music being cheaper to purchase as downloads - and largely instant - there comes with it a loss of the up-to-date music! Time to pay through the nose for data recovery, methinks.

And that is what has happened. I sent that hard drive off to a data recovery company on Wednesday, and today they have confirmed their success in recovering all 18,000 songs from the defunct drive. At a cost of £336. Arg! To think that a brand new 500GB external hard drive can be purchased for a tenth of that price, is it not clear to me that backing up is a whole lot less expensive? Will I ever learn? Perhaps.