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A Cautionary Tale: I Broke My iPod Trying to Fix It

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Well, it’s not really a tale, as a tale implies length. More of a cautionary anecdote… or cautionary aside. All right, a cautionary mentioned-in-passing.

I had intended to fix my iPod’s screen tonight. I’ve previously replaced a broken laptop screen, which has plenty of tricky, footery bits. However, in my attempt, I broke it completely. My humble, 4 or 5 year old player at least played music before… Now it just spins up the drive, has a quiet think to itself, then collapses into a sobbing heap on the floor.

I don’t want to put people off DIY repair, its possible to do. The screens are only like £10 ish. It’s not really that hard, even if the cables are footery, incompliant wee buggers at times. But it is very easy to mess up, especially if you don’t take care.

Also, really fucking important point here: no matter how confident you are of your repair skills, BACK DATA THE HELL UP BEFORE YOU START. Since the device was doubling as my portable hard drive, and since I’m occasionally a dribbling fool, I lost some important things. Mainly bookmarks from my portable Firefox installation and some documents I’d digitised. And some stuff I don’t actually remember putting on there, but believe me, it’s there. Or was. Or still is, just in inaccessible form.

Serves me right for not having a backup script for removable media in place. I will do that just as soon as I procure my replacement. I’ll mosey over to the Apple store tomorrow and see if I can’t haggle their price down from ridiculous to merely hideously profitable. If I can, then comes the act of restoring all my music and data. Joy of joys.

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