A couple weeks ago I booted up my eMac which had laid dormant since February when I bought my Intel iMac. When I started up iTunes on the eMac I noticed all the songs had exclamation points next to them. This made sense to me because all the music on my computer was on my iMac and no longer my external firewire drive. So I did a select all and deleted them from iTunes. When I went back to my iMac almost all the songs there had exclamation points next to them. Uh oh. Every song prior to February was gone. I went into the xml file and found that every song I imported after getting the iMac was right where I thought it would be. However, everything else was in some hidden trash folder on the firewire drive. Deleting them from the eMac deleted them permanently. I was freaking out. It was then I wished I was using the new Time Machine application. Then it occurred to me that all my music was still on my iPod. I found shareware that would recover the songs off the iPod but it didn’t maintain the file names so I had to import them all back into iTunes. There are now stored in the right place but I lost all my ratings, play counts, etc. It kinda sucked but better than losing all my music completely.
I decided to move everything from my firewire drive to the iMac and then devote the drive to Time Machine so this wouldn’t happen again. I copied the folders Documents, Movies, etc. Then I set up Time Machine and turned it on. Everything is great. Fast forward to tonight. I actually get a great idea for a comic so I boot up Flash, my recently used files aren’t there. I expected that because I moved the Documents folder to the iMac. I went to File->Open, there is no comics folder under Documents. I use spotlight to search my entire computer for .fla files, none found. I went into Time Machine and went back to the beginning, no comics folder. I lost every comic file I’ve ever made. Now I am freaking out. I can’t think of any time I’ve made a backup of that folder in another location. My best guess is that the comics folder was already on my iMac and when I copied Documents over it overwrote the entire folder. That’s what I think happened.
So there’s not going to me any comics for awhile, if ever. I don’t think I could ever get them to look exactly like they did before. If I do decide to do a comic I might do something completely new. Let this be a lesson to you, everything you create will eventually be gone.
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3 users responded in this post
Oh crap… that sucks.
Gotta love filesharing. I had a similar experience in school on the UNIX machines when I made a few links to our project folder. One of them must’ve pointed to the main directory, because when I emptied the trash using OpenWindows’ file manager, our files disappeared. *poof*, they were gone. Sucks.
Understatement of the year award goes to CraigM. “Sucks” doesn’t even begin to describe the loss.
Not that this helps RC, but his travails describe why I never use iTunes, never use automated backup systems, and never use apps that try to be smarter than I. Some things are just too important to rely on the Apple “Just Works” mystique.
E.g. I have four years’ worth of pix from my digital camera, and I never ever want to lose those. I have copies on two separate machines in my house, periodic copies to DVD-R, and a periodically-updated copy on my web-hosting provider.
Not trying to demonstrate how great I am, but instead telling everybody to be paranoid! If you have something backed up, back it up again, somewhere else. Disk space is so phenomenally cheap– at 50 cents a gigabyte, my aforementioned photo collection costs me three bucks to copy– you can’t afford not to.
I create DVD size encrypted disk images from iPhoto every so often and upload those to my Dreamhost account. That way I know they are backed up remotely, and that no one can see them without the password.
Now with OS X Leopard and Time Machine, you have no excuse to every lose a file again.
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