Concern

You have your laptop at work, and got a new iPhone. Your phone is synced with your desktop computer, which you never use directly anymore, you just use it as a media server via iTunes, so you decide to move your iPhone to sync to your laptop instead. You have “Back to my Mac,” and you connect to your desktop that’s in Santa Cruz through it.

You clicked on “Drobo” by accident, instead of “Macintosh HD,” which mounted that volume. “Drobo” is your Drobo drive, which holds all of your iTunes music; note that BTMM mounts this remote drive as /Volumes/Drobo, which is the same mount point on the desktop.

The recipe for moving an iPhone to a new Mac is roughly this:

1. Close iTunes on both computers.
2. Copy the metadata files from ~/Music/iTunes from your old mac to your new mac. This means shit like iTunes Music Library.xml.
3. Copy the files ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iTunes*.plist from your old mac to your new mac.
4. Launch iTunes on the new mac, sync the phone, back it up, etc.

That worked fine, and I was able to sync and backup my old iPhone, and then restored my iPhone data to my brand-new iPhone. But, since I used my (more than 5500 song) other iTunes library to do this, the version of iTunes on my laptop had references to all these songs that are on the wrong computer. So I went and deleted them all, puzzled by how long it was took. I even hit "delete files" instead of "keep files," because heck, the files weren't even there on my laptop.

But remember, via Back to my Mac, the drive with all my music on it was mounted as a network drive. With the same mount point as on my desktop.

This means that I deleted my entire iTunes music library, over the Internet.

All the files are in the trash on my desktop computer, but now I get to restore them all.

You might assume that someone savvy and smart with computers would never fuck anything up, but no, the opposite is true: the savvier and smarter you are with computers, the more spectacularly you fuck things up.