As a child, one of the things I feared most was a house fire. Not that I thought about this much, but the notion of losing everything (toys, pictures, etc.) was frightening.

These days, it doesn't take a house fire to cause a panic. An error message will do.

Today, my digital music collection clocks in at 100,272 songs. That's the equivalent of 10,000 albums. It has taken me six years to put it together on my computer, including two long years of digitizing my vinyl. I can't quantify the exact amount of time I have spent on this particular part of my music collection (I've kept all the "archaic" versions as well), but it's a lot. And last week I received my biennial error message.

Cheap hard drives (and boy, do I buy them cheap) don't like cycling through 100,000 files hundreds of times a day. That sort of work tends to wear them down. And every so often, they give out.

The last time this happened, I was able to salvage my files one hour at a time. That is, my old hard drive worked for about an hour before it had to take a break. This time, my hard drive simply refused to work when engaged by iTunes. While it seemed to be relatively stable at other times, that sort of thing tends to put me on edge.

I'm not one of those tech geeks who backs things up religiously. I'm cheap. No extraneous spending, no wasted motion. No backup hard drive. My music collection walks a high wire every day.

So when the current cheap hard drive begins to show its age, I tend to get a bit antsy. Yeah, I know, I should've plunked down the eighty bucks a long time ago. For that matter, I should've plunked down the twenty-five bucks for a new DVD player when the one we used with the TV went on the fritz. But I'm cheap. So when we want to watch a DVD, I bring up the player from the basement (where I use it as the CD player for my stereo system). Cheap, cheap, cheap.

For the most part, being cheap works well. We've been able to live comfortably inside the Beltway on an income that is below the median. Okay, it does get a little cold in the winter when I turn the thermostat down to sixty, but only everyone else in my family complains. And then when we bump it up to sixty-three, the house feels positively Caribbean.

Cheap is not so good when the hard drive goes out. Then I begin to panic that the thousands of hours I've spent setting up my music collection will go up in a puff of electronic smoke. I chastise myself for not thinking ahead (or learning from past mistakes). And I walk around in a state of near-panic until I am able to transfer my songs to a new (functional) hard drive.

I've bulked up to a terabyte drive. That's one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) bytes. One billion megabytes. One thousand gigabytes. My first external hard drive (back in 1992) was a 10 megabyte wonder, and I thought it was huge. By the time Sam gets to middle school (five short years from now), I'm sure that petabyte (one quadrillion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000) drives will be the norm. Yowsers.

My drive has more than music. It has most of the pictures we've taken on our varied digital cameras. It contains the contents of my web site (though I have backed that up in a couple other places). It contains a lot of the information that's important to me. And an error message is just as frightening as a house fire.

Yeah, I could rebuild my music collection. And we could replicate most of our pictures, as we've sent enough of them out to friends an relatives. And most of the rest probably wouldn't be missed as much as I think it might be.

That's the thinking that got me through the occasional house fire panics when I was a kid. The toys didn't worry me too much (though we did have a couple of rare Star Wars figures, like the tall Snaggletooth). It was more the pictures and books that worried me. But we could rebuild those collections if necessary. Our friends and family would pitch in.

But I don't like being put in that position. So I'll be buying a backup hard drive. Soon. You know. One of these days. Really. I mean it.

Though, what's the rush? I just got a new drive, the files are fine and everything works great...

Jon Worley didn't buy a new pair of shoes until the soles completely separated from the uppers on his old ones.