It’s never a nice thing when one of your hard drives die, but the mistake we see so often is folks will delay in re-backing up the data that they DO have.

As soon as one of your hard drives has a problem, you need to check all of the devices and backups that might have relied on the drive that died on you.

Below is an e-mail that came into our Baltimore office today, that is exactly what we’re talking about. Nobody ever expects to drop one of their iPods or iPhones in the toilet, but it happens more than you think.

Good rule of thumb: Keep iPods and iPhones out of the bathroom.

Names and locations redacted to protect the innocent:

My name is XXXXX XXXXXX. I dropped my iPod in the toilet accidentally days after my computer’s hard drive got fried. I dried the iPod off immediately as best I could and dried it in 1 pound of white rice for 10 days. It sort of turns on when I plug it into my computer. Basically, I don’t have a back-up for most of the 30+ GB of music on it and need some help salvaging the music and the iPod if possible. I live in XXXXXX XXXXX.

Don’t forget that iPod Videos and iPod Classics have 1.8″ hard drives inside of them. With an iPod (or a portable hard drive) you’re working with an elevated level of risk, as one drop of these delicate hard drives and you could be in a data loss situation. DO NOT store information on your iPod that is not also stored elsewhere.

When you are planning your backup, don’t forget about your iPhone and iPod. Also, with an iPhone you do need to plug it into a computer from time to time, as that also backs up the iPhone. If your iPhone were lost, stolen, or damaged, you could get a new iPhone and hook it up to iTunes and restore from your last back up.

Also, the “rice trick” does work, but not with a unit has liquid in the hard drive. If water gets inside the hard drive, it’s generally toast. In cases of using the rice as an agent to dry out your device, it should not be used blindly. This means that the unit should still be opened up and inspected. Rice won’t remove corrosion caused by whatever liquid got into your unit. With Apple products of all types, don’t forget that liquid can affect the various alloys and chemicals used to produce the Apple device in ways that you might not expect. This is a leading factor in folks that got liquid inside a unit, but did not open up the unit to check it after they got the unit “dried out” on their own.

So you and your friends are fooling around, and somehow someone manages to spill an “unknown” liquid into your iPod Video. Ok, that’s not a happy thing, but applying heat via a cigarette light to dry it our is not the smartest idea.

In this case you can see how the iPod’s Click Wheel is melted from the heat, and if you look carefully it’s just slightly burnt around the edges.

MacMedics to the rescue! We fixed this unit for $49. New iPod Video Click Wheel and a free iPod Video battery with all iPod Video and iPod Classic repairs.