iPod Recovering Deleted Songs

If anyone should ever experience the sheer terror I have by accidentally deleting their entire iPod library, I can recommend PodSalvage. I'm not usually one to part with AU$50 for shareware software but considering it would probably take about 2 days to re-rip all my CDs, I thought it would be worth it. So far, it's recovered what looks to be almost all the songs (13.5GB worths) and their tracknames (though not file names) are still intact.

I still think it's too easy to delete songs off an iPod!!!

I was recovering the songs from the iPod itself. And the recovery process is now complete. To give an indication of the success I had, my library contained over 2800 songs and I recovered all bar 24. And those tracks I'm re-ripping now.

And I knew I didn't have much time so pretty much as soon as I realised how much of a dick I'd been in deleting them, I was on google searching for programs that could help me.

Never again!!

The only way I was able to find out which songs were missing was to imported them into the library and auto save copies in the iTunes folder (that got the titles and numbers back onto the file titles)

Then in column view I just checked each album folder and if the last file number was larger than the file count at the bottom of the window then I knew something was missing.

And I'm happy to say I'm now all back to normal. Weird thing though, of the 24 tracks, 22 were less than a 60 seconds in duration. I have no idea what that means but it's interesting to see.

With the benefit of 24 hours I'd now like to retract my praise of PodSalvage as it's not turning out to not be the miracle worker I first thought.

The amount of corrupt files I'm finding is ridiculous. As soon as I wiped the iPod I didn't add a single thing and went straight for PodSalvage.

It wasn't until playing some songs tonight when I noticed some were just cutting out. So, I've started sweeping through the tracks (another tedious process) and dispite being only up to the letter G in artists, I have over 50 songs I need to re-rip. Either the file is too small (eg. 2MB for 4 minutes) or very large (100MB for 3 minutes).

Now this might not be the fault of PodSalvage but it hasn't saved me any time. All it's done is cost me money.

So, unless you have no way of backing up everything, the amount of time I've spent trying to re-salvage everything with PodSalvage and fixing up the holes, I could have re-ripped all my CDs by now.

In short, don't wipe your iPod!!

The Truth said:

In short, I would say that anything on your iPod is supposed to be a replica of whatever is in your itunes library right?

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In theory I think that's what they say you should do but I know few who actually do that. I didn't have a spare 15GB for just music on my old harddrive. But I was in the process of setting it all up so my iPod Library would mirror my iTunes Library on my PB when the deletion occured.

iMeowbot said:

Making backups can be tedious but it's sooooo worth the trouble!

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Oh yes! Once I've finished re-ripping everything ( I'm about 20% of the way through. Doing 10% a day I've decided) then I'll make back up DVDs of everything (so about 4-5 DVDs worth).

I've certainly learned a very important lesson here.