It’s a long story, and I’m not going to relate it all. Suffiice it to say, that when I removed a single album from the Media Player 11 beta inventory I’d backed up the source MP3 files and watched to see if it would delete the album from my hard drive. It didn’t. So, after having tested to see how things behaved, I started to delete everything out of the inventory. (For some reason it hadn’t inventoried some tracks, it was bugging me, and I was going to have it redo things again.) This time, however, it did start to delete the files on the hard drive. I don’t know why the behaviour was inconsistent. I stopped the process but not before I’d managed to wipe out a big chunk of my CD collection.

I first hunted around for a utility that told me the empty directories (the process had removed the files but left the directories intact) – so I could tell which albums I’d lost. Then, I managed to recover some of them by copying music back from Michelle’s iPod. This was an interesting process, since the new, native, iPod plugin to Winamp doesn’t allow for copying music from an iPod back to the hard drive (although it’s planned for future versions). I also couldn’t get the legacy version of the plugin (which does let you do this) to work with the new version of Winamp – it would just keep crashing. In the end I made use of a free utility called EphPod to copy the music back.

Now, however, I’m left facing the prospect of having to re-rip about 170 CDs in order to restore the music I’ve lost. As a result, I’ve since ordered a Buffalo HG300 LinkStation from TigerDirect so that I (finally) can have a proper backup solution for my server and workstation. I’ve been meaning to get one of these for a while but haven’t had the ready cash for it. In hindsight, it’s probably cost me more to not have bought it already – so I’m not waiting for the next disaster that could be easily recovered from by having a good backup in place.