Syllabub.net

A friend of mine’s PC has died and along with it his iTunes library. He still has the music on his iPod and wanted to know if/how he could recover the files. The good news is that you can, although it is a little bit fiddly.

NOTE - you must follow the instructions exactly.

Manual Approach (files only - you would lose playlists, ratings, etc)

• Make sure you have installed the current version of iTunes (7.x)
• Connect your iPod to your PC - when asked if you want to sync select ‘Cancel’ - failure to do this will DELETE all your music

• Under iPod options - select ‘Enable Hard Disk Use’ (ignore the warning)

• Under Preferences (Menu - Edit, Preferences) go to the Advanced tab and select ‘Keep iTunes Music Folder Organised’ and ‘Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to Library’ and hit OK

• Close iTunes - Apply the change

• Open Windows Explorer - go to My Computer - you should see your iPod as a drive letter (eg E: F: G:)

• Hit F3 or the Search button to searchSelect ‘All files and folders’
• File name is ‘*.m??’ - that is all files which are mp3 (standard music files) or m4a (Apple AAC music files)
• Look in ‘My Ipod (E:)’ or whatever your iPod is called
• Click on ‘More Advanced Options’ - select ‘Search hidden files and folders’

• You should see a bunch of files with strange filenames

• Select them all (Ctrl-A or Menu - Edit, Select All)

• Copy them (Ctrl-C or Menu - Edit, Copy)
• Create a new folder on your desktop (Music)
• Paste the files (Ctrl-V or Menu - Edit, Paste)
• Open iTunes and hit ‘Cancel’ when prompted to sync
• Resize the iTunes window so you can see your ‘Music’ folder on the desktop
• Drag the ‘Music’ folder onto iTunes
• You should now see it copying the songs
• If you have bought any music from iTunes you will need to authorise your computer (Menu - Store, Authorise Computer). If you can, you should also de-authorise your old computer (you can authorise up to 5, and can reset this once a year)
• You’re done!

I tried some free software to do this for you, iPodRip for Windows - but it didn’t work… There’s also iPodSoft, which I haven’t tried because it costs $10

I am going to try really hard not to sound patronising… this is meant to be helpful after all and no-one likes being criticised.

Okay, here we go - you have to back up your stuff, regularly. Otherwise one day you will lose it and it may be important, sentimental stuff that you would really rather keep…

There are plenty of options, and most of them are free, or at least very cheap.

Online
There are tons of online services which will help you store your files. If you get a gmail account you can store up to 3GB of stuff within your email account, so you can just zip your files and send them to yourself@gmail.com and you’re done - this works up to 10MB per file so isn’t viable for very large files (eg. audio/video) or for very large amounts of storage. For photos you can use Picasa - simply upload them and you’ve got a permanent copy of all of your photos up to 1GB. If you need more than this you can purchase 7GB for $25/year.