My library!!!!!

[rowley]

I woke this morning to find my library drive (1 TB external drive), holding 33,000+ tracks, audiobooks, over 1,000 videos (tv and movies) clicking and whirring with a disk failure.
mounting it seemed ok, then it would reset making the mac shout at me for "not unmounting properly"

This drive is now knackered - so I've lost all that media. I've recovered some tracks off other machines using homesharing, pulling what I can back into a fresh library on a new disk, I've also used iExplorer to copy music and videos off my iphone, and redownloaded my itunes purchases - but only a 5th of what I originally had. I'm gutted.

- Should I invest in iTunes Match in case I lose my local library again?

- As I get promo tracks from music labels for my music podcast, will these get updated once the album is released on itunes with Match?

Your thoughts please.

 

[iPhysicist]

I woke this morning to find my library drive (1 TB external drive), holding 33,000+ tracks, audiobooks, over 1,000 videos (tv and movies) clicking and whirring with a disk failure.
mounting it seemed ok, then it would reset making the mac shout at me for "not unmounting properly"

This drive is now knackered - so I've lost all that media. I've recovered some tracks off other machines using homesharing, pulling what I can back into a fresh library on a new disk, I've also used iExplorer to copy music and videos off my iphone, and redownloaded my itunes purchases - but only a 5th of what I originally had. I'm gutted.

- Should I invest in iTunes Match in case I lose my local library again?

- As I get promo tracks from music labels for my music podcast, will these get updated once the album is released on itunes with Match?

Your thoughts please.

iTunes match is nice to have but won't save your videos. How about a backup drive?

 

[r.j.s]

Isn't Match limited to 25,000 songs?

 

[maflynn]

You can try one of those expensive data recovery services. I guess my recommendation for the future is to use a NAS and have a backup. a NAS unit will have the option of being mirrored and so if one volume dies you have the other but nothing really takes the place of a backup

Sorry to hear about the troubles Your options unfortunately are limited

 

[DavoteK]

I'd recommend investing in a Synology, 2 or 4 bay unit so you can have all the content on say a 2TB or 3TB drive and then it gets backed up via RAID on a 2nd 2TB or 3TB drive.

Synology DS212J or a Synology DS411J. Not cheap and there are more expensive models from Synology, but Synology one of, if not the, best.

 

[rowley]

Thanks, food for thought - I should follow my own advise I give to others - back it up before you lose it

 

[maflynn]

but Synology one of, if not the, best.

QNAP is also a highly rated NAS, and I have that myself. Either one will serve you well.

 

[SandboxGeneral]

You can also try repairing the HDD with Spinrite if you have an IBM-PC you can hook it up to. Spinrite is an awesome tool that I've used numerous times to fix bad sectors and recover HDD's and OS's.

Here is my old MBP HDD in a Dell PC with Spinrite running on it.