Whelp, I just deleted six months worth of music.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

See, I was pretty excited for Windows 7

I have a long history of wiping my drive (DBAN FTW) before reinstalling the O/S.

Back in the Win 98 days, I’d reinstall probably every three months.

Windows 2000 was pretty decent, I’d only reinstall every six months.

Windows XP was great, great I tell you! I’d run maybe a year at a time without a reinstall.

Windows Vista - hell, Vista takes a lot of flak. But once they patched UAC to be a be more forgiving I found it to be a perfectly fine O/S. Again, about a year before wipe and reinstall.

As you might have noticed, I am highly familiar with wiping and reinstalling.

I was pretty excited for Windows 7. So excited, in fact, that with the release looming last Thursday I thought I would prepare early.

Keep in mind, I’ve wiped everything (with backups of course) and resinstalled a couple dozen times. I’m good at this…or so I thought.

Wednesday night, I spent a few hours backing up everything. Took a few minutes to reflect - “Am I forgetting anything?”.

After thirty minutes of reflection, I load up DBAN and I’m ready to go. DBAN takes a while, I start it Wednesday night. Go to sleep, thinking “Man, what a savvy computer user am I!”

I wake up Thursday morning.

Literally the first post-sleep thought to pop into my mind:

“Wait, what about all the purchased music from iTunes?”

“…”

“FFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU”

Yep, I just nuked six months worth of iTunes purchases. I average maybe 2-3 albums per month. So that’s like $200 worth of music lost to entropy forever.

I am so smart. :frowning:

2

Man I wish I was you.

I just lost around 20 years worth of music collecting. 60 gigs. Maybe $10,000 worth, minimum.

3

That really sucks, not just for the loss of money but for the time collecting it. I always buy CD’s so I have a firm ownership of my music. I rip everything I like to feed a micro SD that plays in my car stereo. I have yet to buy a separate external drive for each computer and I’m behind on backing stuff up.

I’ve spent $300 in the past to recover lost data and I know people who’ve paid over $1000 so if it’s any consolation you didn’t lose that much money and everything can be replaced. Consider it a cheap lesson learned. Don’t know if this helps.

4

The sad truth is:

I used to really prefer ripping from CDs, then encoding.

Hell, it used to be a proper hobby of mine - encoding music is a fairly techie pursuit. I progressed through LAME, then OGG, then AAC. I enjoyed it, to be frank. It was a fun hobby.

What killed my interest was finding brick-and-mortar stores that actually carried the music that I liked. They didn’t; I stopped buying CDs. iTunes was an uncomfortable compromise. I never liked that the music I purchased was “licensed”, but there weren’t many alternatives (short of pirating)

5

I have just installed Windows 7 as of yesterday (clean install; didn’t want to upgrade over the RTM) and am currently copying over all of my old drives to two shiny new drives, so I’m getting a kick out of these replies…

I’m paranoid about my backups and stuff. I actually keep them on the hard drive to make it easy to copy over settings, preferences, and other data during the several weeks it usually takes me to get the system more or less back to normal. I still have my old Windows XP partition and my Windows 7 RTM partition just in case. Everything else I’m copying over wholesale to new partitions on new drives before I nuke the old drives. (I nuke the old partitions after the copy successfully completes so I know what I’ve still got left to do.) I’m actually on the last parittion as I type this, so once it’s done then I can start reinstalling more stuff.

I do it this way so I’m not spending so much time working on backups, because with processes that take that long and require considerable organization, I’m guaranteed to forget something. So I do things in real time in this manner so I don’t forget anything and lose stuff. Especially iTunes, 'cos I know I can’t get the music back if I lose it.

6

If all of the lost music was iTunes downloads, can’t you download it again, after providing your account info?

7

AFAIK, no. iTunes doesn’t let you re-download past purchases.

Another reason to hate it.

8

Correct. Only for music though. You can do it for iPhone/Touch apps, though I don’t know why it’s different there. You should be able to download past music purchases, but I’m betting the music companies have a problem with it so Apple has to play along.

9

It wouldn’t hurt to ask. There are reports on the web of Apple making a one-time exception in the case of a HD crash.
Still, I’d like to know how you managed to do this - don’t you just make a backup of the entire drive?

10

This is why I only ever do full backups. No worries about missing something important. Storage space is cheap; why futz around with picking and choosing this and that? Just grab everything . . . and several copies of it to boot.

11

I backup, but infrequently.

I’ve used iTunes since 2004. Since my last catastrophically stupid wipe it’s been about six months (March 2009).

That’s a good idea, though. I’ll send an email to Apple. Maybe they’ll help me out.

12

I’m in the long process of digitizing all of my music. I’ve started with the CDs and I’m in the middle of the letter S right now. I’ve got two computers working to do this, my laptop where I rip the CDs and my desktop where I store them and then back them up to an external harddrive. In this process, I’ve managed to drop the external drive not once but twice. Both times breaking the hard drive and rendering it unfixable. First time it was 400GBs of data lost, the next time was 1.1 TBs of data lost (I’m ripping at 320). Luckily, the hard drive in my computer hasn’t failed (yet).

Still, I’m paranoid and am thinking of buying a BluRay burning and having a 2nd backup.

13

Hey, a happy ending!

I sent an e-mail to Apple explaining how I was an idiot. They reactivated my downloads. Downloaded yesterday, woot!

Good for Apple on having good customer service

14

The re-granting of music is supposed to be a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but they will do it under certain circumstances. It only goes back so far (6 months?) too.

Apple doesn’t like to do it because they have to pay the royalties on the music again, as if they’d sold it all over again. Yes, the Music Industry sucks, you can blame them for this.

Hell, a couple of months ago the Music Industry was pushing for your electronic music to automatically expire after 10 years. And if you go back far enough, they once tried to outlaw people making copies of music they already owned.

Then there’s this: ringtones are not concerts

15

In my case, I sent Apple Tech Support a list (with order numbers) of everything I’d deleted.

The list went back to late February 2009.

I got everything back.