08-11-2011, 08:11 AM

As the title says, I lost all of my music (about 9,500 songs) when I upgraded to Lion (the day it came out). This is my wife's iMac, 21.5-inch, Late 2009 model, 3.06 ghz intel, 8 gigs ram, 500 gig hdd. Lion 10.7 (11A511), iTunes 10.4 (80)

The library showed all the songs, however when you selected a song, it said that the file could not be found (in so many words). I went into the folder where all the music was stored, and none of the files were there. The physical music files were missing from the HDD. I called apple care, and they walked me through a few things (like spotlighting the files, and looking in the music folder), but ultimately they said there was nothing they could do, and that I'd have to take my iMac somewhere that did file recovery/forensics to get the files back, and call iTunes to see if they could make the files she purchased available for download again. I'm not a Mac guru, and have only been using OSX since Fall of 2009, however I'm computer savvy, and manage the computers at my workplace. I've never run into anything like this before.

The only good part about this is that my MBP had most of the songs that she had, since we shared music (except for the 200+ that I didn't have). My question is how the heck does almost 9,500 files go MIA from the directory? I upgraded my MBP the same day, and I didn't loose anything.

Any help is appreciated!

Cheers!

08-11-2011, 09:38 AM

There's always a chance that an OS upgrade can go weird and cause file loss, and there are 100s of other reasons you could lose data. Hopefully you had a backup. If not, I really recommend reading this thread, and start backing up going forward.

Official Backup FAQ or Start Backing Up Now!

As for your previous iTunes purchases, yes, you can do that. There's an option in the sidebar of the iTunes Music Store.

08-11-2011, 09:44 AM

Originally Posted by schweb

There's always a chance that an OS upgrade can go weird and cause file loss, and there are 100s of other reasons you could lose data. Hopefully you had a backup. If not, I really recommend reading this thread, and start backing up going forward.

Official Backup FAQ or Start Backing Up Now!

As for your previous iTunes purchases, yes, you can do that. There's an option in the sidebar of the iTunes Music Store.

My wife did not have a backup at the time. I had set up her system for time machine, but she ran out of room on a 1.5 TB drive, and stopped backing up her system to gain a little more space (unknown to me). I'm looking at doing and online backup solution to help prevent data loss in the future, but for the capacity that we need, it gets expensive.

08-11-2011, 12:55 PM

She did not run out of room... time machine will make room. Also, unless she deleted the original backup, it should still have had all of those songs...

08-11-2011, 07:47 PM

Actually, she did run out of room, she has about 1.4 TB of data that is stored on the drive, in addition to what is on the iMac. But that isn't why I posted here. I'm wondering how this happened in the first place. because the iMac is now becoming slow, and freezes up a lot now.

08-12-2011, 11:38 AM

did you check the iTunes Library folder?

08-12-2011, 01:47 PM

Originally Posted by jrnolan

I'm looking at doing and online backup solution to help prevent data loss in the future, but for the capacity that we need, it gets expensive.

Look at the link I posted above. Backblaze is about $4.00 per month for unlimited, that's not bad at all.

Also you may want to read through some of the links in that post related to Time Machine. It seems you (or maybe your wife) have a misunderstanding about how it actually works based on the comments you've made here about it running out of room.

08-12-2011, 07:07 PM

Originally Posted by schweb

Look at the link I posted above. Backblaze is about $4.00 per month for unlimited, that's not bad at all.

Also you may want to read through some of the links in that post related to Time Machine. It seems you (or maybe your wife) have a misunderstanding about how it actually works based on the comments you've made here about it running out of room.

What I meant about it running out of room is that she has stored 1.4TB of data on the external drive. Time Machine needs an additional 424 gigs of room on the external drive to preform a backup (the original backup was removed), at least that is what Time Machine stated.

The BackBlaze looks pretty neat, and with unlimited storage and ability to backup an external drive, it's a great a deal.