man, i don’t want to go to work tomorrow. i don’t even really want to go to bed tonight.

i did some thinking and i can only really remember three things i had on my drive that died:

1. my original photography RAW files

2. my itunes library (songs/music videos + movies i’ve ripped + a handful of tv shows)

3. my time machine backups

my time machine backups are just backups of what’s on my internal hard drive and my other 250 gig external hard drive, and since there’s nothing wrong with either of those (knock on wood) it’s a moot point for #3.

since my itunes library is all on my ipod (with the exception of the tv shows, but that was only a handful of shows that i maybe watched once or twice and then never again), i’m not too worried about that… i can just use senuti to restore the stuff from the ipod back into itunes in reverse. not too bad!

i only wish that i could still have access to my RAW files… BUT like i said it’s not as bad as it seems! see, i remembered i’ve got most of my images referenced in aperture — i saved the files on my 1.5 terabyte drive and told aperture “ok, here’s where my files are located”, and aperture is smart enough to know when that drive is connected and when it’s not. when the drive is connected, it lets me do everything – edit photos, add tags/metadata, and export the images. when the drive isn’t connected, i can still add tags and metadata, but i can’t make changes to the images and i can’t export the images. the way that aperture still lets me add metadata and place images into different projects without having access to the original image files is because it’s set up to create preview files – jpeg files at a size and quality that i specified – and i had specified full-sized preview files at 8 or 10 jpeg quality, which is almost exactly what i’d be exporting these files as if i were to put them up on flickr or use them elsewhere! it’s just a step or two below the full-quality jpeg setting that i normally use! it won’t let me export the jpeg files, but it does let me drag and drop the images out of the aperture library, so i created a smart album to contain only the referenced files and i just need to drag them out of the library and then re-import these jpeg files. i just won’t really be able to do as much as i can with changing the exposure of the images like i could if these were the RAW files, but i’m not going to complain since i’ve still got at least some access to my images. i was also lazy and hadn’t made a bunch of photos to be referenced images recently, so i’ve still got access to the RAW files for those inside the aperture database too.

so, instead of major catastrophe, it’s been downgraded to just a mild annoyance now. good! i requested a replacement drive and that’ll be shipped out to me for $20 with a prepaid mailer to send my old one back. i could have mailed this one in and then they’d send me the replacement once they received the broken one, but i’d never get around to mailing it in so this makes things a lot easier for me, and i get my replacement in 2 days too.

what i realize i should have done (besides make backups to dvd, but i’d like to see you try to keep good backups of gigs and gigs and gigs of files on dvd) is set things up like this: