Filed under: iPod Family, iTunes
iPod Therapy: Bringing your backup failures into the open
We've all done it. We've taken our music for granted. We've skipped backups, misplaced our original CDs, or stored our music exclusively on a work computer--which inevitably gets upgraded and wiped by Intern Bob when we're not looking. My friend Allison wrote me the other day after her husband Scott suffered from the iPod perfect storm: laptop with his entire unbacked iTunes library at the shop for repairs, possibly to be returned wiped clean, and the "restore with iTunes" message on the iPod. Yikes.
This morning Dave Caolo and I were talking about these iPod backup failures--the business computer example comes from one of his stories--and wondering what kind of music failures our readers have experienced over the lives of their iPods. So we're opening up this post's comment thread as a form of iPod therapy. Come and share your iPod music tragedies with us.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Jon said 1:12PM on 10-01-2007
I used to keep my iTunes library on an external disk so that I could swap it between machines. One day I bought about 200 songs but didn't have the disk with me at the time so it saved them in my Music folder on the hard drive. So later on I connect the drive and switch the iTunes settings to use the external drive. I figured it would copy the files across but it just deleted them! The weird thing is that not every file was deleted, and some files that weren't on the local disk disappeared as well. I complained to Apple but nothing came of it.
Now I just keep my iTunes library on one machine.
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John said 1:19PM on 10-01-2007
This really isn't a personal tragedy of mine... but it is something I know a friend of mine did to a guy in his freshman dorms.
Apparently this guy was a complete ass and my buddy wanted to get back at him.
He got onto the guys computer and rather than just deleting all of his music... he renamed every song [untitled] performed by [artist].
So the guy ended up with 2500 songs all with the same artist and song title.
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Josh said 1:26PM on 10-01-2007
I used to store my entire library on an external HD back when my main computer was a 10GB TiBook. I had about 30 gigs of songs on that drive when the drive started clicking and failed within 3 days (before I had time to get a replacement). I lost my entire library which I had built up for about 4 years. I had about 3 gigs of it saved on my main machine, so I lost everything but that.
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blinkcowz182 said 1:34PM on 10-01-2007
I made an image of my Dell laptop when I got my MacBook. I burned the image to a couple of DVDs and wiped the Dell and sold it. I got my MacBook, threw in the discs and wouldn't you know it? The discs were unreadable. Tried every program on Mac/Windows but no one could crack the corruption. I bid adeu to 40GB of music and a few movies in there as well. About half of that were iTunes purchases so a quick sob email got those reauthorize but I lost a ton of my "unique" music that iTunes doesn't have. :(
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Dave said 1:34PM on 10-01-2007
Backup, backup, backup.
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/09/12/how-to-back-up-your-music-using-itunes-7/
I always make burn an audio CD of purchased music, as well as backup the files to an external hard drive. There are a few utilities out there that will help recover media off one's iPod, Senuti for example (http://www.fadingred.org/senuti/). Never used it myself though.
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Joey said 1:39PM on 10-01-2007
I had to wipe clean my hard drive about a year ago, so I made sure I backed up my library on my iPod. When I finished, I realized I backed up my library of classical/comedy songs (about 300 files) and not the separate library of all the others (~4500 files).
At least I had an iPod of classical music to calm me and comedy to make me laugh...right?
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Joel said 1:41PM on 10-01-2007
I sometimes tinker around in the iTunes Music folder inside my Hard Drive, looking for duplicates and finding orphaned files, and trashing others. I also have a habit of hitting Control-Shift-Delete to quickly empty my trash when I see that it is full. On this particular occasion, my trash was open, and somehow my entire Library folder was in it. I noticed it as I pressed the key sequence, and saw it vanish before my eyes.
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Johnny Thrash said 1:53PM on 10-01-2007
My routine: Buy music. Copy originals to external hard drive. Burn CD. Delete originals. RIP CD. Put CD in CD Case.
I would have to lose my laptop, my CD case, my external hard drive and my iMac.
If that weren't enough, I also have contents insurance in case of fire, tornado, flood, hurricane, theft, or whatever else.
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Joe said 1:54PM on 10-01-2007
Back when 2.5GB was a big hard drive, I managed to screw up a dos command that was intended to copy everything off my drive to a new drive. My mistake created one large file with every file on the drive concatenated, in no discernible order. I spent a week or two with a text editor, attempting to split up the file sensibly so I could save all the mp3s I had, but in the end I lost it all. Remember to verify your backups, kids!
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artifex said 1:54PM on 10-01-2007
blinkcowz, did you finalize your discs when you made them? you'd be surprised how many people forget to do that. you can fix that, though.
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badtzmaru said 1:56PM on 10-01-2007
I had a ton of music stored on a 30GB hard drive. One day, it started clicking and failed. I was so distraught but even more so when I called up the "data recovery" experts and they told me that it would cost hundreds, if not thousands, to get my data back.
As a lark I decided to put the drive in a PC computer with Windows 2000 on it. Somehow, when I started up the OS, it magically recovered most of the files. I don't know how or why it happaned but I was glad it did!
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Brian said 2:08PM on 10-01-2007
How about this one... I had an external HD that I was in the process of backing up my library, when my house was broken into, and both were stolen. Bummer!
Fortunately for the music, I had a fairly recent copy of everything on DVD, so I didn't loose too much.
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Erich said 2:21PM on 10-01-2007
I lost my music collection several years ago from a LaCie drive dying (bad), followed a short while later by my wife losing the photos of our first kid's first year (much worse).
And thus I have put time and energy into making Fubario ( http://fubario.com ) which basically lets you back up your files to friends and family over the net. Simple to install and set up, and yet, not many people (even in my own family) do it... What is the mind-block around setting up backups???
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Donald said 2:21PM on 10-01-2007
I had scheduled a quarterly backup for July 1st of this year to back up my documents (music, pictures, etc).
Guess when something on my laptop decided to die? If you said June 30, a winner is you!
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Peter said 2:41PM on 10-01-2007
I found Amazon's S3 service using jungledisk.com to be a great way to backup music. It is off site, remotely available anywhere, and automatically backs up anything new once a week. Cheaper than buying your own backup drive and much safer.
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Darrell said 2:49PM on 10-01-2007
Had 8,000 songs backed up with an external 200 Gb. Also had it on Macbook at the time. My Macbook's logic board went bad and sent it in. While I was waiting for the turn-around, the back-up failed. Haven't been able to get the disks to spin since. Lost 8,000 songs and 60 Gb of pr()n.
It was a blessing in disguise, though, as I have now ramped up efforts in recouping my losses by getting music from friends and holding 12,000 songs. I also bought a bigger external HD for backup and a 24" iMac with 1TB storage for all my movie/tv show/music/pr()n needs.
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mark said 2:58PM on 10-01-2007
@8/Johnny Thrash wrote:
>>My routine: Buy music. Copy originals to external hard drive. Burn CD. Delete originals. RIP CD.
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mark said 3:00PM on 10-01-2007
[Sorry. The "close quote" characters in my previous post caused the post to be truncated.]
@8/Johnny Thrash wrote:
"My routine: Buy music. Copy originals to external hard drive. Burn CD. Delete originals. RIP CD."
By re-ripping the songs after they're burned on a CD, you're degrading the quality of the recordings that you purchased.
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blinkcowz182 said 3:15PM on 10-01-2007
@artifex
Yes I did, it was an imaging program that made one large "image" file and then spanned that image file across multiple DVD's. One or two of the DVDs had CRC errors (cyclic redundancy check) making that spanned image file unreadable. I've since recovered most of that music so it's more of a tender memory than an issue. I guess I should have checked the images before erasing my Dell. Live and learn I suppose...thanks!
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Johnny Thrash said 3:21PM on 10-01-2007
Mark,
Maybe so, but they are DRMless and I'm not limited to 5 machines to play them on as I move between 7 machines.
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