The moral of this story is to back up your computer to removable media often.

Like you really care, but here's what happened:

Saturday night, I'm transferring files from my old computer to my new Powerbook. I simply dropped the old hard drive into a PowerMac, plugged the Powerbook in with a Firewire cable, and dragged the old to the new. It took four hours, and I watched as everything moved over -- four years of design files, 8GB of music, tons of digital photography. Basically, my life. I sat there for four hours watching each file go from one computer to the other, ensuring their safe passage. When it was all over, I look over the Powerbook's file directory, double- and triple-checking that every song was intact, every file was solid, every photo was unblemished.

And it was. I swear to God. Every single file made it to my new hard drive.

Those of you who are running OS X (and you all should), here's a word to the wise: after making huge changes to your hard drive on OS X, like adding 22GB of data in one fell swoop, it's always good practice to repair permissions. I knew this, and I did this. That wasn't the problem.

Sunday morning, my girlfriend asked to see some photos of our cats that I had in iPhoto. Interestingly enough, my photos weren't loading in iPhoto. Huh. I though something might be wrong with iPhoto, so I burned my entire library from my other computer to CDs, copied it all to the Powerbook, and restarted iPhoto. Didn't work. Tried to reinstall iPhoto. Didn't work. Huh. I'll try repairing permissions again.

Meanwhile, that hard drive I copied everything from previously? It was being formatted to go into my girlfriend's PC. Everything was going bye-bye.

The iPhoto thing is confounding me, so I say I guess I'll just go to the Genius Bar. No big deal.

After getting my girlfriend's PC all set up and ready to go, including reinstalling The Sims and every expansion pack, I decide to take a break and head over to my girlfriend's brother's apartment (he lives in the coachhouse behind us) to chill for a bit. Oh, and I'll bring my Powerbook so he can hear this great song by Parts and Labor. I pull up iTunes, and lo and behold, the MP3 is not there.

Holy shit.

So I open up the iTunes music folder. Holy shit, half of my music isn't there.

I open up my documents folder. Holy shit, over half of the work that I've done over the past four years is gone.

And why is my hard drive reporting that I only have 3GB left on a 60GB hard drive? It should only be about half full.

I'm panicking. The whole idea was to get everything on my Powerbook and THEN back it up because the Powerbook had a DVD burner. 5 or 6 DVD-Rs seemed like a better prospect than 30 to 40 CD-Rs. And I watched everything transfer. And I repaired permissions when I was done. What the fuck was going on?

To make matters worse, I had no internet access because I hadn't set up my new wireless router yet, and I couldn't have set it up if I had wanted to because I didn't have a working computer. AHH!

This morning, I told my boss that four years of work, including schoolwork, was on the line, and God bless her, she agreed that it was an emergency.

If there is absolutely any reason for buying an Apple, it's the Genius Bar. Not once did anyone ask me for my ID, my proof of purchase, my "I LUV STEVE JOBS" tattoo, anything. They simply helped me. And for two-and-a-half hours, we poured over my machine, running every sort of diagnostic doohickey we could.

The good news is that there is nothing physically wrong with my Powerbook. The bad news is that I lost most of my files.

What it seems happened was something went slightly wrong during the writing of 22GB of data in one fell swoop. The more I tried to fix it, the worse the problem became, to the point that it became irreparable. So it's pretty much my fault. In the future, copy files in chunks, make sure it's okay, give the file system a chance to catch up, then copy more. I didn't lose everything, but I lost a majority of it, like past schoolwork, large freelance projects, and the website I was designing for myself, which I've been working on for over a year. It's so sad.

Do I still love my Powerbook? Of course I do. Sure, OS X has it's idiosyncrasies, just like any operating system. One of those unfortunate bugs reared its head and bit me in the ass. There's nothing I could have done.

The moral of this story is to back up your computer to removable media often because computers are imperfect machines built by imperfect humans.