Everything is gone. A moment of inattention, a brief blip or blink, and focus slips and it is all gone. All the pictures, all the music, all the words. Sure, the advice was clearly followed—back up early and often—but most people do that as frequently as they change the batteries in their smoke detectors, which is to say: twice a year [neither often or early I guess].

But everything on my two-year old iMac G5 [do the math: that would have been four back ups] is gone. This had happened once before. That once before moment is one I'm holding on to now as being the defining one because you could see that one wasn't my fault. I blame Palm. I blame Palm because Palm made the Palm Pilot that held numbers that would never be gotten again.

Can I name check a bit?

The three numbers that I had the most amount of chagrin for losing were, in no particular order, Halle Berry's home number, Bill Clinton's personal assistant's cell phone and Don King's cell phone (don't ask). I'd collected these from interviews and I'd not ever get the chance to get them again and when that Palm died I slowly and carefully moved on to my back up. It was curiously corrupted as well.

Manuel Liebeskind, my Swiss mad Mac expert went all CSI on my hard drive and it still resolutely refused to give up its secrets. They were gone Johnson but it was not my fault. Like a hurricane, or an earthquake or a record by Kelly Osbourne.

Captured here by iSight, you can clearly see how OK I am with, um, everything.

However, this iMac debacle was very much my fault. I was installing Tiger. Did you know it actually comes with an Installation and Setup Guide? Well, I do now. In all fairness I did then too but given the much-vaunted ease of Apple installations why would I even use it? Outside of maybe caring about six months of non-backed up info?

In any case when Options offers you an "Archive and Install" OR an "Erase and Install" choice and you're not paying attention and click the one versus the other you know what happens? Yeah, you do: you write sad blogs about loss, the lessons learned and the leavening effects of liquid libations. Lots and lots of libations. A WHOLE lot of libations. Because, after all, tomorrow is a new data-less day and I'm...I'm actually sort of looking forward to it.