A few weeks ago, due to a lack of available space on my MAC, I decided to make some changes. I bought a smaller (300GB) External Hard Drive to use with Time Machine when backing up my hard drive.
Then I took my 1TB Eternal Hard Drive and reformatted it and moved my iTunes files over there. It freed up about 50GB of space and my plan was/is to move my iPhoto files there also, opening up another 40GB or so.
Before I deleted the iTunes files from my hard drive I made sure everything worked correctly. I added new files to the library. I transferred songs to my iTouch...everything was just fine.
Once I got through the holidays I would also burn each playlist (by genre) to DVDs as a tertiary backup.
Christmas morning I went in to send the Christmas playlist to the sound system. Ummm...iTunes Library can not be found...
WHAT?
Open the external hard drive and I can see them there, but iTunes is not opening
Let the day go to enjoy the holiday and Monday morning I go in and restart the computer When I do, the External Hard Drive does not appear on the desktop.
I go and run Data Rescue 3 and it tells me no files can be found! OH CRAP!
Well, then I go and use the Deleted Files function of DR3 and as I write this 48.9GB of audio data is being recovered. A process that will still take 12 hours (been running for about 5).
So, that is the size of my iTunes library (7,600+ tunes), so the data is being recovered, but looking at it before recovering a bunch of file names are all comfuzzled.
Until this process is done, I will not know what I may have lost. 80% of the music is still available to me...where I am concerned are the cassettes I digitized with the Warner-Chappelle Collection on them. 25 90-minute cassettes covering that publishing house's music from the 20's to the 90's.
AND all my live concerts. they may e missing, but since it says 48.9GB and I KNOW that was the size of the library, I am hopeful.
I will let you know. By the time many of you read this, the scan will be completed and I will have an idea of how much has been saved.
SO, how was your Christmas weekend?
STRESS!!! That is stress.
Hope all is well.
Itunes is evil! :p I hope all of your music is salvaged! I totally feel you!
Hope it all works out alright. Just about everyone I know who tried to move their iTunes library had all kinds of problems with it.
Jay
One of my biggest fears is losing all of my music files. But the fear still doesn't make me remember to back up on a regular basis.
Oh man. I hope it all comes back.
Two digital fears of mine...losing all my music and losing all my books now that I have Kindle.
You know what they say, my friend. One should always have faith. After all, isn't that what this season is all about? Miracles. :)
I would be so lost, I'd just shoot the computer, buy a new one and start over. Life is too short for that much stress. Hope it all works out though. I have a mere 9G's of tunes on my laptop.
Shame.. still - could be worse. (am sitting in a relatively undamaged house after horrible storms counting blessings!)
Oh Vinny ... I haven't read all the more recent posts but I pray you were able to recover your stuff. How awful.