System Restore? HELP :(

[Pkisirish]

just bought a 160GB LaCie external for my 17" Imac. I was trying to move over all of my itunes, iphotos and imovies. Well, somehow I screwed some things up and now my Itunes is formatted completely differently than it was and all of my folders don't exist anymore. I have approx 20GBs of music as of now.

Is there a way to restore my system to how it was at an earlier date? I understand you can do this on a PC and I was able to find info on that but I can't seem to find any info about doing this with a Mac. I just want to go back to how my system was configured a few days ago and start over.

Thanks. Please email me at pkisirish2@yahoo.com

 

[Horrortaxi]

I don't know what you F'd up, but this is how i have it set up. Move all your music to the external drive (photos too if you like). Then tell iTunes (or iPhoto) where the library now is. It's pretty simple.

Does that help at all? What errors or other indications of bad things do you get?

 

[Pkisirish]

Well, here's what happened.....

Hey,
Thanks for the response.

I moved Itunes to the external disk and then the music folder from "my computer" Then it still existed as it seemed to have just made a copy rather than moved it. So I moved the one on "my computer" to the trash as it now seemed to be in my external. Then when I went to empty my trash, it started deleting songs from my itunes that was in the external as well. I know on a PC there is something called "system restore" that will allow you to return to the way your system was on a specific previous date. I was hoping you could do that on my Imac as it was all running great before I did this. Now some of my songs are missing and I don't have any of my playlists anymore and my library is not organized anymore. I'm afraid to synch up my Ipod now because it will copy the way the Itunes folder is now set up.

Also, I'm not sure how you tell Itunes where the library is. Thanks again.

 

[Horrortaxi]

In iTunes, go to Preferences > Advanced and you can browse to the new location of the iTunes library. Only move the music though. Leave the library and application where they are.

It sounds like you should still have all your music on the external drive. Did it go like this? When you emptied the trash, the songs started disappearing from the iTunes library? Or they got a funny symbol next to them? I'm betting that's what happened. iTunes was looking for them in the Music > iTunes folder, which isn't there anymore. Do like I said and tell iTunes to look on the external drive. You may have to re-import the songs or trash your library. I recall having some kind of problem doing this--but maybe trashing the library was just the easy or quick way to deal with it. I don't remember it too clearly.

EDIT: With regard to System Restore on Windows--The Mac doesn't have that feature, but it wouldn't help you in this instance anyway. Actually I hear System Restore isn't much use at all.