Finder Crash Results in HUGE Loss!

[themacko]

I finally purchased a FireWire harddrive due to lack of space I've got on my internal 40 gig. Thinking a 160 GB Lacie harddrive for $130 was a smoking deal, I went for it. While transferring my iTunes and iPhoto folders, the Finder hung up and I couldn't get the system to "un-crash" so I had to restart the computer.

Bad move. I lost all 20+ gigs of music and about 3 gigs (2500 photos) in my iPhoto library. The music wasn't that big of deal as I have most all of the original CDs, I just lost a bunch of songs I downloaded off iTunes. The photos however ... words cannot describe the amount of frustration I feel. Four years of digital photos from trips, work, family and friends are gone forever.

So I suppose I'm the newest poster-boy for reasons to frequently BACK YOUR SHAT UP!!! This is more of a rant-informative post than anything, but while I've got your attention: Is there any way to re-downloaded my purchased iTunes songs or am I S.O.L.? I'm assuming the latter.

As far as the harddrive goes ... I think that may have been the culprit. I re-ripped some MP3s onto the external and tried listening to them, but about 30 seconds into each song the drive would start making noise and iTunes would skip to the next song. Needless to say I returned it and got my money back.

Happy Computing.

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

As far as the iTunes music goes, you're pretty much SOL -- but there is hope. I've known a good soul or two that wrote a polite email to the iTunes support staff and was permitted to re-download a certain amount of songs from a lost library. If you don't succeed the first time: try, try again.

I feel for your photo loss. I lost a good 2GB of photos when my hard drive crashed. The thing is, I DID have a backup on a separate drive -- but I was busy reorganizing that drive onto a larger one, and somehow the photo backup got lost/deleted. Now all I've got is the data on the old hard drive that does nothing but "click" when you power up. They're as good as toast to me now.

 

[themacko]

Yeah Jeff, losing photos is a sucky, sucky thing to have happen. That coupled with my recent "super-glueing of my digi-cam" isn't making me too happy. Another long story I won't bore you with.

Oh I forgot to mention this and it may be a bit of a saver. I have some original music on my iPod but I obviously can't get it back onto my Mac ... I know there is software to do this but I've downloaded a few freeware(s) w/o any luck. Anyone have a good suggestion for me?