Space, and lots of it

I got a new iPod. Finally. It is a wonderful piece of gear that I have been enjoying immensely, but I will not bore you with the usual review type crap. Everybody knows what a fucking iPod is. Everybody knows how to use it. Everybody knows. Everybody knows. (good song by Concrete Blonde, BTW)

The story I would like to tell today is about a mistake. You see, I got the 80GB version. Lots of space. LOTS.

Now, I also have about a thousand USB devices plugged into my home PC. I might go so far as to say too many. I know, I know…impossible, right? Well, this is actually too many, because my system has developed the bad habit of dropping its connection with one device when another device gets plugged in. One of the devices it tends to drop is my external hard drive. This is the external hard drive that I do my automated nightly backups to. (Yes, I am enough of a geek that I wrote some scripts to automatically backup specific directories nightly)

Now let’s jump forward to just a few minutes ago. I plugged in my fun new iPod and noticed that I only have 3.3GB of free space left on it.

What?

I bought an 80GB iPod and it is FULL? I had checked my music library, and I know that with the music, videos, and pictures that I put on the iPod, I should only be using about 30GB. But I spent a couple minutes and figured out what happened. When I plugged my iPod in the other day, I kicked my external hard drive off. And the iPod assumed the same drive letter that the external drive had been using. So my iPod became my backup drive. It stayed plugged in overnight. System did a full backup cycle. And I hadn’t noticed what happened until just now.

This means that the iPod is not only large enough for me to put ALL of my music (between 400 and 500 CDs or 6000 songs) on it. But it can then perform a full data backup to it, which includes ANOTHER COPY OF MY MUSIC FILES, and all of my pictures, and etc, etc, etc … And STILL have a couple gigs left over.

That, my friends, is a beautiful thing.