When the music died

After one particular iTunes upgrade, all of my music disappeared. Deleted from the drive they were stored on. It’s OK because I got it back but it was a process, and in the spirit of not getting hosed again, I’m writing down what I did and what I’m now doing to avoid ever having to go through this nonsense again.

In fairness, I have a sightly unconventional iTunes setup. All iTunes files, including the library xml files and metafiles like album art, were stored a NAS networked external hard drive. The drive was connected to the router, a Time Capsule, making it available over the network. This way, I could access and update one library across laptop and desktop machines, and my Sonos system would also have access to the full library. It worked fine, but was a little laggy whenever doing writes, like adding songs or updating metadata. I was happy.

One day I noticed a bunch of missing icons next to my songs. After trying to locate the files on the external drive, my heart sank. The whole library directory had been hosed and all my files were nowhere to be found. 15 years of music, some of it ripped from vinyl, painstakingly catalogued and organized, had vanished. The 48,000+ mp3s, the library files, the playlists, the horror!

After my heart attack, I remembered that I should at least have a full copy of the library from when the initial NAS setup was put in place 2+ years ago. So, all was not lost if I was OK with restoring this old library, losing 2+ years worth of cataloging, adding new music, culling, etc… That was at least an option. I wasn’t totally hosed.

Not wanting to accept any amount of hosing, I figured I’d give data recovery a try. Since the drive seemed to be fine, and I had caught the issue right after it popped up, I thought there was a good chance I could get my stuff back. After shelling out a few bucks for EaseUS, I ran the recovery wizard and rejoiced when it managed to find almost all of my missing files. I was able to restore and get iTunes back to where it had been.

Back It Up

So now, I have a few failsafes to prevent me from having to do this again. If an iTunes update or a hard-drive failure decides to choke out my library again, I’ll be covered.

I did some research and discovered that Google Play music allows you to use your Google account to upload up to 50,000 of your own songs to the cloud using their Music Manager. I downloaded the app and configured it to search for and upload music from my iTunes folder. It took FOREVER (days…) for the whole of my library to push up to the cloud, but I can now access it anywhere, and it’s available for download if needed for a recovery. New things added to iTunes music will automatically get pushed to my Google Play Music library. Even if I rarely use the Google Play app, the fact that I now have all my music secured in the cloud FOR FREE is a no-brainer.

There are some issues with this as a true backup solution for your iTunes library. First,  pushing your music to the cloud is just that, a one-time push and does not really work like a sync.  Changes or deletions that you make in iTunes will not magically appear in Google Play, but any newly added filed will be pushed. Mp3 metadata like genre changes, etc… won’t update in both places unless you update it in both places. If you think of it as more of a giant cloud locker for your mp3 files, you’ll be better off. Also, while I have faith that Google will keep my files safe and sound,  I can’t expect them to continue this service in perpetuity (or to continue giving it away for free). So, this is good, but if I truly want to be able to recover the entirely of a my iTunes library including up-to-date cataloging metadata, playlists, album art, etc…. I needed something more.