Talk about a near scare!

[DaytonaKit]

Yesterday I was in the process of cleaning out my computer, and by some technological glitch my entire external drive got erased.  All my music files were on there, including my violin performances, karaoke songs I sang, and recordings of karaoke tracks that others sang.  I was too numb to cry.

When I shut down my computer last night, a trial software I was using to help me uninstall stubborn programs actually restored everything to what it was!!

I've learned my lesson, and I'm going to use a flash drive for my music now.  As for my external hard drive, I think I'll save that for games, such as SL and URU (when it returns).

[Sean]

Yesterday I was in the process of cleaning out my computer, and by some technological glitch my entire external drive got erased.  All my music files were on there, including my violin performances, karaoke songs I sang, and recordings of karaoke tracks that others sang.  I was too numb to cry.

When I shut down my computer last night, a trial software I was using to help me uninstall stubborn programs actually restored everything to what it was!!

I've learned my lesson, and I'm going to use a flash drive for my music now.  As for my external hard drive, I think I'll save that for games, such as SL and URU (when it returns).

I've had something similar happen to me before but with flash drives.  In fact right now I have one that I know has a few files on it, but if I insert it into a computer it says it needs to be formated in order to use it.

[DaytonaKit]

Technology can be amazingly annoying.  I don't have any problem with the 2 flash drives I currently own, fortunately.

Some of my recent purchased music is still missing, but I've contacted iTunes about it.  There's a record of my purchases, so it shouldn't be much of a problem.  Just annoying.

[Sean]

Yesterday I was in the process of cleaning out my computer, and by some technological glitch my entire external drive got erased.  All my music files were on there, including my violin performances, karaoke songs I sang, and recordings of karaoke tracks that others sang.  I was too numb to cry.

When I shut down my computer last night, a trial software I was using to help me uninstall stubborn programs actually restored everything to what it was!!

I've learned my lesson, and I'm going to use a flash drive for my music now.  As for my external hard drive, I think I'll save that for games, such as SL and URU (when it returns).

I've had something similar happen to me before but with flash drives.  In fact right now I have one that I know has a few files on it, but if I insert it into a computer it says it needs to be formated in order to use it.

Found a good file recovery program that is also FREE, so I've gotten all my files off of the drive.  I got it here.

[Dichromus Benoir-Miles (aka DJ Dich)]

my entire external drive got erased. 

Repeat after me......"Back up. Back up. Back up".    Even external drives need to be backed up regularly if they have important files on 'em. If you have a DVD burner, put your music stuff on a disc. 

[AnneB]

I've had flash drives get erased, but never and external hard drive. I have had windows tell me twice that the drive was empty, but the files were there when I connected it to another computer. Then they were there when I put it back on the main computer; I think it was a windows problem, not one with the drive. But that really is scary even when you have backups.

[DaytonaKit]

Found a good file recovery program that is also FREE, so I've gotten all my files off of the drive.  I got it here.

I'll look into this when I get home.  Right now I'm on my laptop because I'm travellling.  See you all later, and thanks for the tips!

[Malia]

I try to burn the important stuff to DVD's periodically... although each time something happens to my PC I am faced with not having done it recently enough...

As for the iTunes, if you copied it to your iPod you can get it back, I bought something called CopyTrans for around $10 and it was cheaper than replacing all the music I had purchased.  (I originally downloaded the free version, but my iPod contained more than the free version allowed so I upgraded to the paid version.)

[Sean]

I try to burn the important stuff to DVD's periodically... although each time something happens to my PC I am faced with not having done it recently enough...

As for the iTunes, if you copied it to your iPod you can get it back, I bought something called CopyTrans for around $10 and it was cheaper than replacing all the music I had purchased.  (I originally downloaded the free version, but my iPod contained more than the free version allowed so I upgraded to the paid version.)

I used a free program to transfer all the music from my iPod back to my computer so I could then put it on my Zune.  Its called Poddox and it was very easy to use to get my music off of my iPod.  You can get it here.

[DaytonaKit]

Normally transferring songs from the iPod to iTunes, thus my music collection as a whole, is easy.  I just select "transfer from iPod" in the menu.  But I must have hit a wrong button or something when I tried to solve the problem that way, because my iPod went from over 500 songs to 7.

It's now back up to somewhere over 300.  I imported a saved library list, but the list was old.  However, if everything on my external hard disk was indeed restored, I still have the other music.  It's simply not listed in the library.  Importing that from the drive to the library will be easy.  If that doesn't work, Apple will return any missing purchases back to them.  (I know this because I contacted them, and I got a response from an actual human being!)

[AnneB]

Songs I purchase are immediately burned to a CD then ripped back to MP3 format, so what's on my iPod is also on 3 external hard drives and on the laptop. Can't be too careful. 

[DaytonaKit]

I use a software called "Noteburner" to convert my files to mp3.  It creates a virtual CD drive on my computer.  I just tell iTunes to 'burn' tracks to the virtual drive, and voila!  I have mp3s of anything I need w/o needing extra CDs. 

That's also how I take my karaoke tracks from iTunes to Audacity.  Audacity will only import WAV files, so I use Noteburner to convert them.  Then I can record, tweak, then export the final product as an mp3.

But yeah I'm going to back up everything on DVD-Rs, as Dich suggested.  Then I'll save my music on a flash drive.

[AnneB]

I just last night opened an MP3 file in Audacity. I don't have any more .wav files on my computer.

[DaytonaKit]

Were you able to edit it?

[AnneB]

Yes, I was fiddling with the echo effects that Dichromus added to my other song.