A few weeks ago, my Mac died. Again. The kernels, they panicked, and all Apple’s geniuses and tech support men couldn’t revive Freawaru again. (That’s my computer’s name.)

I do most of my work on a desktop PC in my office, and some on a laptop PC that belongs to one of my clients. The Mac sits in the kitchen, where I use it to keep tabs on e-mail, order groceries, blog, and videoconference with my parents. I sometimes take it on business trips, but I always copy only the files I need and then, as soon as I return, copy new or modified files back onto the PC. I back up the PC to a bigger hard drive once a week. So when the Mac crashed, I was secure in the knowledge that no valuable files were gone with it.

Except.

Except my photos, movies, and music.

When I first realize this, all I could think about were the photos. I was literally sick to my stomach at the thought of losing all Aitch’s photos, as well as Minor’s first month with us. Very few of these photos were available in hard copy. Some had been incorporated into movies, which were safe on my iDisc, an internet hard drive that comes with a dot-Mac account. After a few hours of feeling depressed, I suddenly realized that many (not all) of the photos were backed up on my video iPod. The trick was getting them out.

After poking around on the Web for a few days, I found File Juicer, a program that lets you convert the huge “.ithmb” files that lump together all of your photos on your video iPod to .tiff files, which then can be imported back into iPhoto when your new hard drive is operative. There is a loss of quality, as the resulting .tiff files are at a lower resolution than the original files, but it’s a small price to pay for regaining your first kid’s babyhood.

After I had solved that problem, it was a week or two before I realized that my music was similarly trapped. Unfortunately, Apple does not make it easy for people to get their music from the iPod back to the computer, even using a hack like File Juicer. You can’t even see your music files on your iPod; Apple makes them invisible. And there’s no way to synch back from the iPod to iTunes.

For the uninitiated, Apple permits you to “authorize” up to 5 computers to play any music or video downloaded from iTunes. These protections prevent you from sharing willy-nilly. They also may sharply limit your ability to enjoy what you’ve paid for; Husband and I, for example, have authorized each other’s Macs to play our playlists, and since each Mac has died twice, each of us has reached our 5-computer limit without being able to authorize the other’s computer (two dead hard drives + one live hard drive for each of us = 6 “computers”). You can deauthorize a computer via the interwebs, but it’s not so cinchy to deauthorize a dead computer.

Your might wonder what the big deal is, if you only listen to music on your iPod anyway, but if you authorize a new instance of iTunes to synch with your iPod (so you can download more music), it will synchronize that instance’s empty database with your iPod, erasing all the data on it. You can always re-rip all your CDs, but in my case 99% of the music existed only in electronic format. It really stinks that I legitimately paid for most of the music on my iPod (OK, not all; before iTunes, back in the old days, I was downloading music off LimeWire), and through no fault of my own, I couldn’t access any of it. I mean, the photos were my fault; I should have backed them up. But you can’t back up invisible music.

Or can you?

I downloaded a nifty little program called RIP to do the job. This application, whose interface features two simple buttons, first sucks all the invisible files out of your iPod onto your hard drive, and then imports them all back into iTunes for you with the playlists, ratings, etc. intact. You can download a trial version, which you can open 10 times, and then after that you have to pay for it — $15 well spent.

From now on, my backup routine will include all my files.