Dang! Lost all my mp3s :-(

[Mike]

I can´t believe it: My PC suffered a headcrash,
so the harddisk drive data are lost, including the
precious "Latin" mp3s I have been collecting for a decade now.

And it comes worse: My external harddisk which I have used
as a backup for all my files has just told me that a serious error
occurred - oh well, the folder in the files in question is --- empty
Man, and I had a 40GB collection of mp3s, some of them pretty rare,
and the sources are gone.

So I start from scratch again. Except for the CDs that I had been lucky enough
to burn off those mp3s as well as the CDs I bought and digitalized, everything
is gone. Tough.
Better start collecting old records now I reckon

[niallgregory]

Thats a nightmare Mike . Maybe some of us here could help you out with some mp3,s ?

[tumbadora47]

You could try a data recovery program.

[pavloconga]

That's pretty rotten luck to have both drives go down at the same time. If you can't recover your stuff with a data recovery program there are companies that will retrieve the data for you. It just depends how much value you put on the data. I think there are places that will do it for around $300.

I had a situation at work this year where we lost a lot of data on one of the Macs during a system reinstall. I bought a program (online) called 'Data Rescue 3' (for Windows also). It ran overnight and recovered about 90% of the files. Saved the day! http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data ... sysreq.php

I'm sure there are plenty of other products out there also.

[vasikgreif]

In the case you would need to get back some rare recording, I'm pretty sure there are people here who have anything you can imagine and could send it to you - 40GB isn't that much actually, a friend of mine has Latin folder - understand "everything from rumba to most cheesy latin pop" - which has 3TB now...

[Mike]

THanks for all the help. Actually I have tried a recovery program already,
but it was no good. The PC has completely crashed

That's pretty rotten luck to have both drives go down at the same time. If you can't recover your stuff with a data recovery program there are companies that will retrieve the data for you.

You may say that again.
Yes, I might consult a PC doctor tomorrow, but hope is faint.

[Gallichio]

Well that stinks. You could purchase a Mac and use cloud. Never loose anything again. I had 3 PCs crash on me then I had enough losses. Switched to Mac and have been listening to worry free music for years. Just a suggestion. Good luck getting your music back.

[vxla]

Mac's have hard drive failures, too. Best you can do (with whatever platform you use) is back up, often, and test your backups. Keep one in a static-free bag in a secure location.

[Gallichio]

You can back up all your music to cloud. I just have had better luck with Mac. But Yes all computers fail.

[jorge]

Gallichio, I don't think Macs are significantly less prone to hard drive crashes than PCs, have you seen any studies or data on risk of hard drive crashes of PCs and Macs that demonstrate that? There are a lot fewer Macs out there than PCs so even if the per-machine risk is exactly the same on PC or Mac, a lot more people in the population will have hard drive crashes on PCs than on Macs. Your own personal experience may just be a statistical fluke, or maybe you just have more time on PCs than on Macs. Also, many inexpensive PCs use lower quality hard drives than those used in Macs, what kinds of hard drives did you have in your PCs that had hard drive crashes?

As long as you use high quality hard drives in your PC or Mac, and replace the drives every few years, your risk of a hard drive crash will be very low, but not zero. That is why it is so important to keep a complete backup of your valuable data on a second high quality hard drive. The risk of simultaneous crashes of both hard drives is very close to zero. Mike, I am not sure what happened to your files on the external hard drive, maybe the internal drive got corrupted and when you backed up the corrupted folders to the external drive that wiped out the good folders with the same names? Sounds extraordinarily unlikely that the two events were independent, one probably caused the other. That is a good reason to keep old backups at least 2 or 3 backups back, deleting an older one before doing another backup, so if a backup is corrupted you can hopefully discover that soon and will still have a previous backup.

RE: iCloud, I would just caution you to be sure you keep all documentation for each MP3 file that you purchased or obtained it legally, or that you did the original recordings and own the rights, to prove that none of them are pirated. The iCloud process could easily be used for mass surveillance to track down piracy of copyrighted materials. While I haven't heard of that actually happening yet, it would be a logical outgrowth of the iCloud concept and I would expect that it will happen sooner or later. Or maybe it is happening but just has not been publicized yet.

Anyway, bottom line, when you invest thousands of dollars and many hours of your time in collections of recordings, it is worth a few hundred dollars buying external hard drives and a few dozen hours of your time to insure that your time and money are not lost by some catastrophic hard drive event.

[Gallichio]

Hi Jorge,

No computer expert here, just giving advice on what has happened to me in the past. I have heard some of my friends complain about their PCs failing but the friends I have that have Macs are as happy as I am. I have no scientific data nor do I work for Apple. I have owned 3 expensive brand name PCs and they all took a dive on me. I don't know what brand of hard drives they were but I paid over $2000.00 for each of the computers and that was some time ago. At that time I did not have a external back up hard drive. I have lost all kinds of data. I must say that I like the cloud because it offers me another way to back up what I want.

If someone steels your Music it is no different than someone steeling any other property you might own. As a Musician I would like to get paid for my work and not have a ton of un-paid copies given away. I have the CDs for all of my music except for purchases on itunes. I am sure they keep purchased records. I could not agree more that you should purchase a external hard drive, great advice. I just wish I had mine when I had PCs. With my Mac so far so good and I hope I will never have to use my external hard drive to recover my data. I feel for me a Mac is more user friendly. Just mu 2 cents.

Mike, Good luck trying to get all your stuff back.

Thanks
Mike

[jorge]

Hi Mike,
Some PC manufacturers use the cheapest drives available in large quantities, some of which are more reliable than others. It may be true that Apple uses fewer different brands of hard drives, or has better QC or both, but either way, you still need redundancy and backups to protect your data. Since the iCloud is out of your direct control, it seems to me to be not entirely secure, although it might be good for an offsite secondary backup of data you already have backed up.

Another option is to install a second internal hard drive and use it for backups. Backups go faster over the internal bus than over USB or FW. Some people even use RAID to keep updated copies of everything on 2 drives, but that is probably overkill for long term storage that you could do with nighttime backups. With an internal data only drive, if your boot drive crashes, you have to fix or replace that (you could use image files stored on your data only internal drive), but your backed up data on the data drive will be safe. If the data drive crashes, you will still have your original data (ie music files) on the boot drive. Internal drives are cheaper and faster than external, and less easy to be stolen.
Mike (in Germany), is your external drive crashed or it just has empty folders?

[Mike]

Mike (in Germany), is your external drive crashed or it just has empty folders?

Yep, empty folders in my external hard disk,
and a "PC doc" told me there is nothing to be done...
I have learnt my lesson.
Luckily enough there are many youtube tracks
and other download links that can be recaptured,
even if this involves a lot of time.
I have started to rebuild my collection, Tito Puente, Cal Tjader and
above all Mongo Santamaria being the first ones.

BTW my PC is going to be trashed completely as well.

[TONE74]

RE: iCloud, I would just caution you to be sure you keep all documentation for each MP3 file that you purchased or obtained it legally, or that you did the original recordings and own the rights, to prove that none of them are pirated. The iCloud process could easily be used for mass surveillance to track down piracy of copyrighted materials. While I haven't heard of that actually happening yet, it would be a logical outgrowth of the iCloud concept and I would expect that it will happen sooner or later. Or maybe it is happening but just has not been publicized yet.

I agree theres a movement going on I know because I downloaded a movie torrent and a month later my cable service sent me a letter telling me it was downloaded illegaly.
I always keep my external hard drive offline and the pc as well when backing up just to be safe.

[Tumbao]

I recently had a similar situation, but fortunately I was able to back most of my stuff up on the cloud (Carbonite) prior to the internal HD failing. The problem I had was that the internal drive failure prevented complete back ups to the external drive, but between the external drive and Carbonite I was able to restore everything I really wanted. I can't comment on the "big brother" aspect of the cloud, but I'm less worried about that than I am data loss.

One caveat--the Carbonite "restore all" function did not work for me and I had to have their tech support manually select files for restoration. This was a bug and should be fixed by now.