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ultranova13

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 9, 2009
1
0
My laptop harddrive crashed (and I didn't have a backup) but all data is in Apple TV? Any way to get it out? Thanks!
 

jhsfosho

macrumors 6502
Jun 9, 2006
288
0
Houston, TX
I'm sure there is a way that you could remove the harddrive from the apple tv and put it in an external usb drive case. Then load that into os x to recover your files that way.
 

dmm219

macrumors 6502
Aug 25, 2008
416
0
I've never done it, but I've heard you can simply FTP the data off the ATV...google around...you'll find a solution somewhere..will take some hacking tho...
 

Cave Man

macrumors 604
My laptop harddrive crashed (and I didn't have a backup) but all data is in Apple TV? Any way to get it out? Thanks!

The easiest thing to do is to pull the ATV's drive and connect it to your Mac. It has a 44-pin ATA interface, so you'll need an enclosure with that (e.g., USB2 for a notebook drive). All the files are on the Media partition, but will have ambiguous names used for storage in the XML database of the ATV/iTunes. If they are metatagged, the names will be easy to recover with iTunes. If not, well...you'll spend a lot of time figuring out what each is.

Make sure you get a back up hard drive once you get everything resolved. It's a life (file) saver.
 

roidy

macrumors 65816
Dec 30, 2008
1,027
22
Nottingham, UK
The easiest thing to do is to pull the ATV's drive and connect it to your Mac.

Cave Man wouldn`t it be easy and more importantly save your warranty to use a PatchStick to enable ssh access and get the files that way or does the act of using a PatchStick delete the media from the ATV?
 

Cave Man

macrumors 604
Cave Man wouldn`t it be easy and more importantly save your warranty to use a PatchStick to enable ssh access and get the files that way or does the act of using a PatchStick delete the media from the ATV?

Well, the Patchstick method hasn't worked for me (I've tried three different thumbdrives) and there's the possibility you'd brick your ATV hard drive - in which case all media on it could be lost. I can pull an ATV drive in about 3 minutes and attaching it to your Mac has virtually no chance of losing data on it, so I guess it would depend on how comfortable one is for such things. Personally, pulling a hard drive is much easier for me.

The warranty is another issue - and one to be considered for sure. I guess since mine's been out of warranty for so long, I don't even think about it at this point.
 

roidy

macrumors 65816
Dec 30, 2008
1,027
22
Nottingham, UK
I`ve used a patchstick on my ATV at least half a dozen times and never had a problem restoring it back to factory defaults. The thing is I never keep media on my ATV so that is why I`m not sure if the patchstick deletes all your media or not.
 

jk1002

macrumors member
Jun 18, 2008
63
2
I have done it.

I connected through SFTP (most ftp clients support that) then downloaded the files. I have forgotten the path wher ethey are.

Once that was done I created a new library in itunes, imported the files. I had the itunes flag organize files set so it created a directory structure based on artist and album just like I had it before. It also renamed the song files.

Here and there it messed up and I lost a ton of album art but that was better then re-ripping my entire collection.

Cheers
JK
 
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