Even with all that, I discovered that one album I had downloaded literally minutes before heading to the airport for my San Francisco trip wasn't backed up anywhere. Both Amazon and iTunes let you redownload music you've purchased through them; I used iTunes Match to redownload the tracks. So that wasn't a big deal.

I had gone along with the Apple Store Genius's plan to order a near-identical replacement for my MacBook Pro's failed 500GB drive. (Truth be told, the replacement drive would have been slightly faster than the one my MacBook Pro had shipped with.) But as I drove home, I debated whether I'd made the right choice. The future is in solid state drives--the Retina MacBook Pro and the MacBook Airs all use flash-based storage, which is zipper than traditional hard drives, and theoretically less prone to failure since it has no moving parts.

I called the Apple Store and canceled my order. Instead, I ordered a from OWC. It cost $248--more than the $180 Apple wanted for a drive with twice the space. And yet I still pulled the trigger, because I figured some good should come from this experience. I wanted a blazingly fast hard drive.

I was nervous about installing it--I'm decidedly not a hardware guy--but a video walkthrough at OWC assured me that even my clumsy fingers could handle the task. I installed the drive in about 20 minutes, and then installed Lion by running the installer from my Mac mini with the MacBook Pro again in Target Disk Mode.