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?
