.... it happened again.

[Johnnyecks 33]

Many people here may remember the calamity I had about 10 years ago, that was documented pretty well here, when my wall of soundtracks crumbled to the ground crushing approx 2000 cds.

Some may remember a few years later my cd case being stolen by a customer, that contained about $500 worth of collectible cds namely the JG at Fox set.

Well, it has happened yet again. I am not so sure why this black fucking cloud is over me, or what I did to create it... but it will not leave me alone.

This time, the physical is still there. But the digital... is all gone. 10 years worth of ripping, tagging, etc... gone.

My Lacie 650gig drive suddenly started flashing error signs saying that my disc was not being properly ejected. Not sure what the issue was, I looked at the disc and everything is fine. I shut the computer down a few times, unplugged all cords, etc... finally got that error to go away but in place of that, I started getting a "this drive cannot be read on this computer" or something similar.

It is there under disk utility. I can see it. It just will not mount.

I just spend $109 for Disk Warrior, and it sees the disk and says that the directories are ready to be repaired. Not sure what else to do. This is a last ditch effort to try to save MY ENTIRE MUSIC LIBRARY (not to mention movies, thousands of photos, personal files..etc). Reviews of DW are pretty high, and they fixed peoples problems quite often, so I am really hoping this works.

I have it running in the background, and it has been on inspecting and task 1 for about an hour. I have to leave for work in 3 hours, at 4am, so I guess I am just going to let this do its thing.

Hopefully when I wake up to leave, I will have a better outcome.

Goddamn it. Lesson learned I guess.

Next thing to do, if this does work and I can get to my files, is to buy 2 or 3 or 527 external HD's for backups I suppose.

I am so pissed. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. The though of re-ripping everything, tagging, importing artwork...etc... of all my physical cds is daunting enough. But I have hundreds, if not thousands, of iTunes purchases and other various digital only sources of music. Also, all my photos... what the fuck do I do now?!!?

One thing that is certain, if there is a God out there.... he fucking hates me.

[Wojo 2,453]

Sad that I can read the thread title and your username, and instantly surmise what happened.

I hope the DW program works and that your files are all recovered. I can sympathize. I have lost two hard drives as a result of physical drive failure, and so neither was repairable without sending to a specific company, which I was unwilling to do. Otherwise, SanDisk's RescuePro works well at recovering files from flash media, but I'm not sure about its ability to look at hard disks. Likewise, Recuva may only be able to get to files that have recently been deleted on otherwise healthy drives.

I hope that "repair" process actually repairs the data, instead of simply making the drive ready to receive data.

My only advice to prevent data loss is to acknowledge that an external drive is only a backup if it is not the only copy. There should always be another copy on a drive that is usually kept turned off, in a safe location. Grama's house or a safety deposit box in a nuclear fallout shelter safe bank. In my case, that leads to three or four different versions of files, as I'll clean the tags of the music in this location without updating the older copies elsewhere, or clean up some photos that I copied to the desktop long before I moved them off the stick. OCD, I guess.

Good luck.

[Trent B 337]

John,

Ouch that sucks that has happened. I've got a terabyte external drive and only one. Hopefully next year I can get another one and back everything up on it and keep the back up for when ever this one goes dead. I have had my external drive for about a year now and so far it's been doing great.

Not sure how reliable Lacie drives are but Western Digital are supposed to be the best drives out there.

[Koray Savas 2,251]

At first glance at the title, I thought your marvelous shelving went down. I shuddered at the thought of all those CDs on the floor. It may be rude(?) but losing the hard drive isn't all that bad.

At least you've got the physical CDs in the end; and I believe iTunes lets you redownload everything you've purchased. It's a huge blower that you've kept photos and documents, etc all together with the music though. I do that separately, since all that stuff is small enough for a flash drive.

[Maglorfin 196]

At first glance at the title, I thought your marvelous shelving went down. I shuddered at the thought of all those CDs on the floor.

Same here! Jeez! Well, to quote Mrs Collins from Carrie, it's a really shitty thing to happen but why don't you give the drive to some computer repair professional and have it repaired or at least the data from it rescued/transferred onto another drive? I think it's what I would do if it happened to me.

[Melange 446]

Many people here may remember the calamity I had about 10 years ago, that was documented pretty well here, when my wall of soundtracks crumbled to the ground crushing approx 2000 cds.

I remember it well (and the accompanying photo of the carnage)

Some may remember a few years later my cd case being stolen by a customer, that contained about $500 worth of collectible cds namely the JG at Fox set.

Was this the one stolen from the car?

But the digital... is all gone. 10 years worth of ripping, tagging, etc... gone.

Nightmare! Let's hope at least some of it can be retrieved. Every so often I have a flash of recognition that I've got far too much data all in one place (drive) which could be snuffed out in the blink of an eye due to any number of accidental or intentional calamitys, and I get to work distrubuting stuff into backups. I think that's the risk of large capacity drives (even camera cards) now, that users need only to keep everything in one place and if that dies on them then all could be lost, rather than just some of it. I had that happen to me a few years ago in Nepal. I had all my trekking and touring photos on a 2gb camera card, sifted through the card in a local internet cafe to send a few examples home on an email and some kind of mischevious program got onto my card and the rest is history. Now I only have a few thumbnailed low res photos that I sent home on an email. At one time I only had128mb cards, which meant they would be full before long and were burned to disk.

[Nemesis 245]

That's a horror scenario. I have two 2GB external harddrives with films and almost all of my cd's stored.

Then another two 2GB drives with the same content, but these two are stored at the house of my parents.

"Paranoid!" you my say? Nah, I don't think so

[Melange 446]

Then another two 2GB drives with the same content, but these two are stored at the house of my parents.

Wise move. For all the backups we make, a house fire or robbery will have no mercy if it's all in the same house.

After scanning very old family photographs into digital form I've done similar,distributing copies throughout the family.

[Richard Penna 3,680]

Not a nice feeling; I can definitely sympathise.

Although I have to admit, my first thought when I read the subject and saw your name was 'he kinda sucks at building shelves'

My advice echoes everyone else's - make sure you've got at least two copies (original, and one backup) at all times. Preferably more, and as soon as any of them gives even a whiff of trouble, check your other backups are rock solid.

As much as I hate thinking about stuff like fires/robbery, if it happens, you're going to regret making no preparations. If I go away anywhere, I put one backup at work, and when at home, my 1TB external would simply be the first thing I grabbed in an emergency.

[Melange 446]

Although I have to admit, my first thought when I read the subject and saw your name was 'he kinda sucks at building shelves'

"If you build it, it will falll".

All my CDs are in the lowest draw of a cabinet, very close to the ground.

[King Mark 3,631]

I have my MP3's on 2 drives at any one time

[Johnnyecks 33]

Thanks guys. I apologize, last night ... this morning, I was being all dramatic.

I know I had to get a bigger drive, this one was getting close to capacity, and I knew I should get two so that I had a backup as well. I stopped burning dvds of my collection awhile ago, not quite sure why and I had it in the back of my head that this day was going to come, but I kept putting it off.

It's not like I dropped the drive or unplugged it while it was reading/writing. It just made a funny little whirring sound and then those errors started popping up. Now, 10 hours or so later that program finally stopped trying to repair it.. and low and behold it said it is far too damaged to be fixed. What the fuck! Nothing happened with this drive, I am beside myself.

After some investigating, I found out that my iPhoto's library is actually on the computers hard drive and not the external. I remember moving everything over at one point but it must of just copied it... which is a good thing. But not to brush this off, I still lost ALL of my music. Not some, ALL. Everything. This morning in the car I was browsing whats on my iPod and the thought hit me that I can't even transfer anything new. I better get used to what I have on there now. Everything is gone. Even the music that is on the iPod is only existing on the iPod. It's a depressing thought. In addition to the music, all my movies, the two hours of documentary footage that I shot over the past four years or so (nothing much, but it is a project I have had in the back of my mind for years), is gone. All my edited home movies are gone. All my audiobooks, and iPad books are gone. 10 years of podcasts also gone.

The only things that I can recover is the music from the physical cds, and the iTunes purchased music. Cd's that I have gotten rid of, or music from any other source ... is gone forever.

The audiobooks, iPad books, movies, and podcasts are forever gone. I cannot afford to repurchase anything at this moment. Eventually, down the road, I suppose I can... but I had so many I don't even remember everything I had. Which, I suppose is also bittersweet because....

... on the positive, I guess this makes me re-evaluate my collection. Yeah, it was huge and vast. But in trying to remember what I had, I will probably only remember the ones that I loved and need to have. All the rest , I guess, is filler. I'm sure I'm going to remember something that is going to get me all pissed off again, but.... like someone on FSM said... "How's your family". It really puts things into perspective.

I'll just slowly rebuild from my physical cds and iTunes purchases and go from there.

This gives me an excuse to rip the cd's all lossless now.

SO, I have a question for all of you....

It is now evident that I should buy two externals. One for storage, the other for permanent backup. Which ones should I get. I was looking at

http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=external+hard+drive+for+mac&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&prmd=imvns&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&biw=1394&bih=768&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=shop&cid=5735071157001810957&sa=X&ei=BkeUTpCUIobf0QHE29W6Bw&ved=0CJEBEPMCMAA#ps-sellers

$85X2 is reasonable.

Once I get the drives, what is the BEST way to re-rip the music in lossless. Can this be done in iTunes? What is the process for going lossless. How much space does it take up?

Thanks for reading. Sorry for the dramatics. I'm over it. Still pissed, but over the shock and horror of it all.

At least the shelving is still there this time around!

[indy4 155]

Wow, that sucks!

[King Mark 3,631]

I only have about 110GB of music

I only save in flac specific scores, most is MP3

[BLUMENKOHL 1,068]

Disk Warrior has saved my ass twice. Sucks it didn't work here. If you deem the value of the content you lost enough, you can send the hard drive in and have your files retrieved. But it's very pricey.

But again for future reference:

BACKUP YOUR BACKUPS. And after 5-6 years, move to a fresh hard drive (you'll be able to get better technology at the same capacity if you like for much cheaper).

Also consider transitioning to solid state gradually.

An important tip to keep in mind with higher capacity drives: Their failure rates are significantly higher. It's better to store 2 TB of files over 4 512GB than 1 2TB drive.

A nice benefit of working with smaller drives is that if one drive goes bad, your entire library doesn't go with it, just a part of it might. So you have risk mitigation, on top of the failsafe of having two backups.

[Melange 446]

I once worked in a place where external data drives were lined up on a bench with a gap at the back and a drop of a metre or so to the ground.

It was an accident waiting to happen. But my subtlly put prophecys were ignored.

One day one of the assistant managers (luckily) knocked one of the external drives over and it fell down the gap.

We weren't asked to stone her to death in the car park, but senior management made her life rough for a few weeks.

She'll never put on a lifejacket again.

[pixie_twinkle 48]

Man you've had some rotten luck. On the positive side, your misfortune is a warning to the rest of us to back up our collection soon.

[Koray Savas 2,251]

Once I get the drives, what is the BEST way to re-rip the music in lossless. Can this be done in iTunes? What is the process for going lossless. How much space does it take up?

If you use iTunes, everything can be done rather simply. Change your import settings from mp3 or AAC to Apple Lossless and just import all your CDs. The amount of space triples, or something close to that.

[Trent B 337]

At first glance at the title, I thought your marvelous shelving went down. I shuddered at the thought of all those CDs on the floor.

That's what I thought too when I saw the title of the thread early this morning. Glad to know that is simply not the case.

By the way the stuff on your iPod can be transferred to your computer. There's a program called "iPod Copy" and you can get a version for the iPod Classic and iPod Touch and transfer your stuff over. All though you'd have to download the full cracked version via torrent since I think the full program is a bit expensive. However, it really does work as I have used it myself in the past.

So the whole what's on the iPod is staying there forever bit is actually not true. Just a heads up on that.

[Jay 37,339]

I didn't use that program, but I used a similar one. It actually copied back my Play Count and Last Played as well, it was really nice. Oh, and my playlists too!

[Wojo 2,453]

All the music on your iPod can be copied to your computer -- or anyone's computer -- simply using Winamp and the ml+iPod plugin. Both are free. Kiss iPod copy protection goodbye using those gems.

[Marian Schedenig 8,191]

Not sure how reliable Lacie drives are but Western Digital are supposed to be the best drives out there.

Had a bad experience with a WD drive, and their customer support sucked. I had to send in the drive to some service center abroad, at my own cost. Never got the drive back.

I'm sticking to Seagate these days.

[Richard Penna 3,680]

Whatever you do, don't buy Formac. We received a batch at work a few years ago; half didn't work, most had opened cases and we just sent the lot back.

I've never had a problem with WD drives.