01-17-2009, 05:15 PM

Hi everybody, I am new here and I hope you guys will help me find a solution...

I am a DJ, so I have a lot of music and it is extremely important for me. I stored all that music on my external hard drive (NTFS Formated) in different folders ("EPs", "Albums", "Singles....) all those folders in my main folder "Music". Since I know my macbook won't write (just read) on my NTFS hard drive, I bought Paragon NTFS to Mac.
I started iTunes and told myself; lets make my iTunes music folder change to my "Music" folder in my external drive! I made the change and unchecked "Copy Music to Music folder when added to library", but I also left checked "Keep Music Folder Organized". All that in the advanced preferences in iTunes. I then launch one of my many many songs in my folder "EPs", which is itself located in my folder "Music". (I hope you readers are following me...). I listen to the track then go back to my "Music" folder and double click on another song, this time located into a folder named "Singles". I listen to the track and then go back to my "Music" folder to find out that my folder named "EPs" had become "September" and my folder named "Singles" had become "Eric Prydz".
I then open both of those folders to find out that all the music that was located inside those folders have disappeared and all that is left is the two songs i just listened to, both organized in their "Artist/Album Name" Folder.
I called Apple, ran a "GetDataBack" scan on my external drive, and only found about 10-15% of what I lost.
Now, my question is: What happened to those files? Is there a way to get them back? Some people from the apple support line told me that something wrong happened when iTunes tried to organized my music since my drive is in NTFS and paragon sometime makes errors...

Please help me!
All I can say as a conclusion is

01-17-2009, 07:28 PM

For starters, DO NOT mount the drive and don't try to write to it until you can do some recovery.

Since the drive is formatted to NTFS, I strongly suggest using a PC program which can recover files from a NTFS formatted drive. If you have access to a PC, go to this web site and download one of the many free file undelete utilities which are available. Try "NTFS Undelete" first.

The reason I suggest using a PC is because there's a great deal more utilities available for Windows which can do file recovery and are free, than there are for OS X.

Also, be very careful when you manipulate large amounts of data using the Paragon driver. Normally the driver is very stable but when you start to do data transfer like from one drive to another, corruption can occur.

Regards.

01-17-2009, 09:54 PM

Ok, that being said... What do I do now?!

01-18-2009, 12:03 AM

Originally Posted by thenice_guy55

Ok, that being said... What do I do now?!

Did you download the undelete program "NTFS Undelete"? If so, run it from Windows 2000, XP, or Vista. Let the program search the drive where the files were stored. If you haven't written over any data on the drive, the program should find files that were deleted by iTunes. Restore the files to another location - preferably another external drive. If you don't have another external drive, restore them to a separate folder on the PC, NOT the root directory. (very important)

It's going to be a long tedious process and you'll have to supply the first letter of every file you undelete.

Regards.

01-18-2009, 12:16 PM

Yes, I have done more than one scan (with GetDataBack and Data Rescue II), and found only 10-15% of my lost data...
Did the several scans I made write data on my disk and therefore went over my lost data?

I am very desperate now...

01-18-2009, 05:21 PM

Originally Posted by thenice_guy55

Yes, I have done more than one scan (with GetDataBack and Data Rescue II), and found only 10-15% of my lost data...
Did the several scans I made write data on my disk and therefore went over my lost data? I am very desperate now...

Understand. If you used both GetDataBack and Data Rescue II and only recovered 10 to 15 % of data which was lost, then using further utilities such as NTFS undelete probably will not work any better.

The scanning methods used by both programs are such so as to not write to the drive. Whatever data is there, is still there.

About the only thing I can suggest at this point is professional data recovery which can be very expensive. But if your music is your livelihood...

You might want to call this company and speak with them. Explain what happened. They'll give you a free quote over the phone. Telephone number is toll free.

There are other data recovery services you can inquire from. Just use your Google search function to find them.

Regards.