Sunday, January 28, 2007

I hate iTunes more than I hate Microsoft

I hate iTunes more than I hate Microsoft



So ... when I started putting folders from my giant hard drive into iTunes, I asked around and everyone said, "you are copying the folders, not moving them." When I looked at my external hard drive, there were TWO music folders. I assumed that the one with the BSG downloads was the iTunes one, because it had many of the same folders, but not all -- which makes sense, because I hadn't copied over all of the folders. So today, I looked at my iTunes folder, and decided I wanted to tidy it all up by starting afresh. Assuming that the stuff was still resident on my hard drive, I deleted. TO THE RECYCLE BIN, MIND YOU. I then went to my hard drive. Nothing there. Not true. Folders, but no actual music. I went to the recycle bin, and restored EVERY music folder. AFAICT, about 60 gigs of music is just gone. I am gutted and looking for advice. I'm also seriously considering calling X and asking him if he'll re-load my hard drive, if I send it to him. I am so truly upset.

8 comments:

Jane Dark said...

Eep! I'm on the verge of this same problem. But Wil Wheaton ran into something similar once, and when he talked to iTunes, they gave him a one time complete do-over -- he was able to redownload everything. And they told him that they would do this for everyone. So it might be worth writing their customer service.
Hope things work out.

Another Damned Medievalist said...

Now this is bizarre -- I bought BSG season 2, and it was one of the things I deleted. And yet, the files are still there!

Wegie said...

Ah, iTunes. Such an evil thing. If I ever have to go back to teaching software engineering for a living I'm going to cheerfully use it as an example of how not to allow the user to have control over what they think they're doing.

Now to the bad mews. You may want to pour yourself a single malt before reading any further . . . The windows recycle bin defaults to a size of approximately 1/10 that of the physical hard drive. Assuming that you've got a relatively modern machine with a 200 gig or thereabouts hard disk, the recycle bin has a capacity of about 20 gig. Now comes the nasty bit. If you attempt to put more than that 20 gig or so into the recycle bin, windows doesn't tell you that the bin has gone beyond capacity, it just deletes the data. Permanently.

Alternatively, assuming that the data *was* still on your external drive (that depends on a number of things like whether you imported the music into iTunes or just told it to use the external drive), you've run into the equally nasty habit that windows has of not ever sticking data deleted via the network into the recycle bin, so it's possible that the stuff is still sitting around in a deleted state on the network drive.

There are a few possibilities: the first and most expensive (but most likely to get everything back) is to get thyself, thy computer and they network drive down to the nearest really good computer shop that does data recovery (being very nice to your campus sysadmins may pay dividends at this point).

The second is to install an undelete utility and see what it can retrieve. The problem with doing this is that when you install it you'll undoubtedly overwrite some of the file pointers still lying around on the disk, so you may not get everything (or even anything in a worst case scenario) back, but it'll be able to look at your external disk for anything there as well.

Thirdly, send external drive to X along with bottle of his favourite poison.

Another Damned Medievalist said...

Argh. I was thinking that might have happened, after hearing something similar elsewhere. For reasons that make no sense to me, my default for the recycle bin was set at 10%, but the profile tells me that that's only 3.99 GB. (I think it's a 200 GB drive, but may only be 100GB. Either way, 10% should be at least 10 GB, and there are NO space issues.

I may call X for advice tomorrow. He will berate me for trusting Apple. What really upsets me is that I looked through the help files, and AFAICT, I followed the directions. iTunes never gave me the "keep files" option. Just the "recycle bin or permanently delete" option. And before I did this, I was regularly playing one album at a time with Windows Media Player. I went into the music folder, I clicked on a file that had music I'd added to iTunes, and played it. There was no good reason to think that iTunes was doing anything but adding shortcuts.

Wegie said...

Yeah, I saw the message over at your other place. Deepest sympathies on the whole mess. The one thing that made me glad when my ipod gave up the ghost (all of three days after the warranty ran out, of course) was that I wouldn't have to use iTunes any more.

If you were playing files from the external drive in WMP before everything got munched, this suggests that all the deleted files are probably (cross fingers and invoke deity of choice) still on the external drive in one form or another. A decent undelete utility should get a large percentage of the files back.

As for the 3.99 gig message from the recycle bin profile, ignore it. You could set the recycle bin to be 50% of a terabyte disk or even explicitly to 399 gig and it'd still tell you exactly the same. If I remember rightly, it's a nasty hangover from the days when windows couldn't cope with a file bigger than four gig.

Good luck!

Another Damned Medievalist said...

I didn't know you knew that place!

Wegie said...

I don't have a LJ account (I probably should get one, but I feel guilty enough about having a blogger account and not blogging) so I never comment, but I do stop by quite frequently and see what you're saying that you don't say here.

The "why I became a historian" post recently had me snuffling champagne up my nose in total recognition of my own viewpoint of certain breeds of pseudo-academic writing. Of course, that's why I got a B in Eng Lit at A Level ;-)

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