Too much of a good thing?

I keep all my digital data on an external hard drive - that’s movies, photos, music, writing - everything. Or at least I did until it died last week.

At the weekend I turned my computer on, loaded up iTunes as usual and it told me it couldn’t find the iTunes library (which was on the extrernal hard drive).

So I checked ‘My Computer’ and the D drive wasn’t there - so I checked to make sure the USB cable was in - it was, so I checked to make sure the drive was plugged in and the plug was on - it was.

So I unplugged it all, plugged it all in again, restarted the computer, checked the bios and boot order and BANG it was there when I got back (not BANG it killed it).

But it wasn’t there, all that was there was a shell - I tried to click on it and it asked me to format it - why would I format something that had EVERYTHING on it - my whole digital library.

So I tried to restart again with, as you’d expect sod all luck. So I posted a couple of teary messages to various message boards and did a bit of a web search.

After a bit of discussion and a lot of help I downloaded a few applications - none of which made a difference. So I resorted to the screwdrivers and took the drive out of the casing.

I put the drive directly into the computer and tried the applications on that. After a promising start with getdataback it all fell through after about two hours when error after error flooded in.

In the end I had to give up and accept it was toast, accept I’d lost all the data - my wife didn’t take the loss of photos that well - my last back up was three months ago and we only post the best pics to Flickr.

But she had most of the photos we’d lost still on the memory cards so that wasn’t such a big deal - we permanently lost about 200 photos from about 2 days out.

But there is other stuff

So the photos ended relatively well and we can always take new pictures, what I can’t get back is some of the really rare radio programmes I’ve downloaded and had archived.

And the time involved in re-downloading my TV show library or re-ripping my DVDs. The time to get my music library back as well - there’s the ripping of CDs and not to mention the mass of music from iTunes I can’t recover.

The thing I’m most upset about, well the three things are all radio shows. I had every episode of Just a Minute and I’m sorry I haven’t a clue - I can get them again.

I also had every radio episode of Absolute Power which, thankfully, I still have on my iPod so as long as I use anapod or similar to get that off before it dies - I’ll be fine.

But the thing I doubt I’ll ever get back is the ‘In The…’ series. This was the show that came before Absolute Power but features two of its characters (played by John Bird and Stephen Fry).

It took a LOT of creative web searching to find them all and the only place that had them was Demonoid pre-shut down - they’re not there now.

But does it really matter

However - as annoying as all of the above is - I’m not sure it really matters. After all I’ve already watched or listened to most of the tv/radio and barely had time to listen/watch anything anyway - as there’s so much media and entertainment in my life already.

Too much of a good thing?

I currently have dozens of books, hundreds of DVDs, thousands of CDs, boxes of computer games for various platforms, magazines, comics, toys, the web, an iPod, Sky+, a Nintendo DS and a couple of book/sitcom ideas.

Most of the time, I set out to work towards a plan of doing as varied a set of entertainment things in a week as possible - but end up doing the same few things all the time.

There’s only so much time for media in any given week so I usually end up ignoring or missing most of it.

Thanks to the iPlayer, Side Reel, Channel 4 catch-up, ITV.com, iTunes, You Tube and every other streaming media service you can think of - I rarely ever watch my DVDs, I hardly look at the TV and my digital media library was touched once a week at most - and that was usually only Top Gear.

Thanks to every English language newspaper website, the BBC, Channel 4, Sky, Blogs, Final Gear, The Register, User Friendly and other text based sites - my book library has barely been looked at.

In fact I’ve now been carrying the same Doctor Who book in my bag for about three weeks and am less than half way through - I used to get through one of these in single sitting.

So that’s why the question in the headline - I used to consume a lot more media than I do now in a much more detailed way - now I sort of skim a lot of different things, although most of the time I just don’t bother doing anything - I used to DO more as well.

Has the increased amount of content available to me actually dumbed me down, I think it’s made me want to do a lot less with my time then when I had a couple of choices.

Maybe Anthony Jay (creator of Yes Minister) was actually on to something when he suggested the BBC should only have one TV and one radio station - but only if nobody else is allowed on either.

Maybe its time to go back on the choice culture and everything available society and be told by Aunty what we need from our entertainment - what’s good for us.

Or maybe we just need to be better at managing our time - I know that’s all it is for me.

I’m going to re-build my digital library, I’m going to re-rip the music and DVDs, I’m going to hunt down every missing radio show and I’m going to add more than every before - when I get my new computer.

But I’m also going to set myself a goal of managing my time better and using/enjoying more of what I’ve got available.

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