"Oh no, I have downloaded music from iTunes but my pc failed... can I redownload it?"

[sUPERdUCKY]

I have noticed this question get asked a lot...

I am going to let you know of my experience of this...

Over the past few years I have bought a singe here and there from iTunes...

last year I lost about 3 songs and requested a redownload and was treated very kindly with fast response and a download waiting for me when I logged on to the store...

This year however I thought I would buy all my music from iTunes for a month to give the digital downloads a go and see how I liked it I bought a £100 iTunes voucher and a bundle of CD-R's to back up my media I then found that iTunes was great and I was finding music I wouldnt normally buy !... within the week I bought another £100 voucher and another bundle of CD-R's...

Right now I am wondering why I ever bothered with Cd's ! but then just last week I bought another £100 and downloaded some music on my desktop but OH NO ! my CD-R's have run out ! but no sweat I'll just buy some tomorrow *phew*

The next day would you beieve the hard drive totally failed and I could not get into windows so I then panicked and have tried surfing the net to fix the PC with no results it appears the drive is just corrupt... so sitting here with my laptop I emailed Apple yesterday assuming they would understand my problem and send me my 16 tracks....

Then today to my horror they have emailed me the following:

I'm sorry to hear that your PC is no longer working, and that you have lost some of your music collection.

After researching your request, I found that on 4-28-06 you were allowed to re-download the purchases you had made with the account "xxxxxxxx@gmail.com". This was an exception to the iTunes Store Terms of Sale. I'm sorry, but the iTunes Store can't make another exception for you.

Apple encourages customers to back up their hard disks regularly. If the disk needs to be replaced, you can restore your purchases and other data from the backup and avoid the need to purchase replacement copies of your collection. These articles may be helpful:

How to back up your media in iTunes (for iTunes 7 users)


I do understand this ! but it's such an annoying situation where I normally back up to the extremes (audio cd of every piece of music AND back up DVD) I would have thought they would have been kind enough to give me this.

Now before I get flamed the facts:

*Yes I know I should have backed up
*I do understand it's NOT Apple's fault

HOWEVER they are a MASSIVE company what would they lose really by giving these few downloads.... except of course not doing so and possibly losing a customer who spends too much on their music... I really don't now what to do now of course I will spend my remaining balance but with the risk of this hapenning again I feel I'd probably be better with CD's...

Has anyone else had this hapen to them ?

On this subject however does anyone have any ideas of how you have retreive files off a corrupt hard drive - is this possible?

[studogvetmed]

That's the way the cookie crumbles, though there have been rumors around that one could get a redownload once a year.

Just because Apple is a massive company does not excuse you of responsibility (which of course you acknowledge). So suck it up and back up to physical media or a secondary drive from here on out. If the risks are too much for you or to much a waste of time to go and do, then stop purchasing from iTunes and only buy physical CDs.

Work within the terms that are given to you.

Good luck.

[honeybee1236]

last year I lost about 3 songs and requested a redownload and was treated very kindly with fast response and a download waiting for me when I logged on to the store...

The savings for those 3 songs wasn't worth it.

I had a external hard drive crash and lost some of my purchases but only replaced out of my pocket the ones I really wanted which weren't that many. The TV Shows I lost I didn't like to much after viewing so I decided not to replace them. I was unable to burn the shows to a DVD because the corrupt drive locked the iTunes purchases onto the drive and I couldn't burn them nor move them off of the drive. It crashed overnight and took my files with it.

You could use an external HD to store your music on and disconnect it from your computer after transferring your purchases onto it. This way if a crash happens your files are on a separate drive and won't be effected.

[jhollington]

Now that my library has grown gargantuan (almost 1TB), I've actually started to get a bit concerned myself about keeping all of my data on a single non-redundant hard drive. In my case, the bulk of the storage is ripped DVDs, although there's a lot of time invested in doing that.

Rather than trying to back up a large library on a regular basis, I've invested in external drives that are internally mirrored, which protects against normal hard drive failures. This of course doesn't rule out the failure of a drive chassis, but even then the drive itself can normally have the data recovered from it.

In my case, I've gone with the Western Digital MyBook Pro II drives, which contain a pair of 500GB drives. You can either stripe them for 1TB of total storage, or mirror them for fault tolerance. Yes, you get half the space by mirroring them, but you don't risk losing your data in the event a drive fails.

[sUPERdUCKY]

Hi all,

thanks for your replies, I suppose on hindsight i have lost 16 songs = £0.79*16 = £12.64 so I suppose it could be worse. I'm sure theres' been unfortunate people ho have lost somewhere in the £100's (possibly more :S)

I will look into a external hard drive and I had been looking at the My Books but in any case I think I would prefer just to have the physical CD's as it feels safer (to me) (after I spend the rest of my Gift Voucher of course) - which is a shame because I was really enjoying instant purchases but hey, that's how things go sometimes I suppose.

Honeybee were'nt you at all annoyed at paying twice for the files ? I mean I *might* download songs that I really want with my voucher but I really would feel that it's a waste of money...


But it does sound like mirroring would be a good idea :D

Thanks again :)

SD

[jhollington]

Actually, I have a friend who burns audio CDs after every iTunes purchase, which gives him the same physical medium for backup purposes, as well as having a DRM-free version for future-proofing his library.

Obviously, burning the tracks to CD as audio files may be a bit much, but a couple of CD-RWs would probably suffice for a data-CD burn. There's also a backup function now built in to iTunes 7 (you can find it on the "File" menu), that offers some options for backing up to CD/DVD as data files, and can backup only purchased content, and/or only files added since a previous backup.

The backup feature itself works quite well, although the limited capacity of CDs or DVDs is not really adequate for people with a massive iTunes library.

[sUPERdUCKY]

Hi, jhollington

thank again for your reply I remember a while ago you said you had a friend who copied every purchase to CD-R and I liked this idea so I did this myself - but unfortunately at this time I had ran out of CD-Rs - I also have a back up of ll my purchases (minus these lost ones) on DVD-R but this would be costly to do so all the time costing both time and money...

but if I buy a external hard drive I assume I would have my music library on my hard drive and the second copy of it on the external drive ? is there much technical details in setting up 'mirroring' ?

[studogvetmed]

Hi, jhollington

thank again for your reply I remember a while ago you said you had a friend who copied every purchase to CD-R and I liked this idea so I did this myself - but unfortunately at this time I had ran out of CD-Rs - I also have a back up of ll my purchases (minus these lost ones) on DVD-R but this would be costly to do so all the time costing both time and money...

but if I buy a external hard drive I assume I would have my music library on my hard drive and the second copy of it on the external drive ? is there much technical details in setting up 'mirroring' ?

From a technical standpoint it's as simple as dragging your iTunes folder to the external for a copy and then copying both the .xml and .itl each time to have all the important information.

Not sure of the best way to automate it. Too bad the back up function in iTunes doesn't suport externals yet.

[jhollington]

Well, there are two ways you could approach the issue with a second hard drive. Actual disk mirroring may or may not be practical depending upon your configuration, since it generally requires two drives (or at least two partitions) of the same size. Mirroring (or "RAID 1" as its sometimes called) works on the principle that every block that is written to disk is written to both disks simultaneously.

Both Mac OS X and Windows XP SP2 support software-based RAID 1, although again it's probably more complicated to setup than you might want to get into, unless you were to buy two external drives for your music library.

There are some relatively inexpensive drives out now that support hardware-based RAID 1, however, such as the WD MyBook II Pro that I mentioned above. In this case, you have one chassis with two internal hard drives, and these drives can be configured in a mirrored configuration if you so choose. This is far better from a performance point of view than having the operating system do it.

Note as well that mirroring won't protect you against software faults or corruption that occurs as a result of the operating system or other software, since anything written to one drive will be written to the other at the same time.

If you're simply buying one external hard drive to use as a backup of your music library, then your best bet is to do just that.... Use it as a backup solution. There are a number of tools out there that can be used to backup your data to your external hard drive on a scheduled or on-demand basis. It's not as automatic as a mirrored drive solution, but it has the advantage of preserving a separate logical copy of your data, so even if you were to accidentally delete or overwrite something, you still have another copy to recover from.

[Cold Irons]

I know everyone here is already saying it....but let me say it again:
Backup, Backup, Backup!

I have 14000+ songs (only about 100 from iTunes), so the time investment to re-rip, fix tags, get artwork for these songs is huge. In my case, it's not the $100 worth of iTunes, its the time to re-rip my 1200 CDs. I have 2 external USB drives with auto-backup once a week - I decided a few months ago that even a single backup was not enuff....

[paranoidxe]

I backup all my favorite songs and my iTunes purchased songs..that spans about 7 DVD-Rs. I really don't like the idea of a external hard drive..because they have the potential to crash just like a PC hard drive..if not MORE since the external's casing can get banged around.

[jhollington]

Although true, the probability of both your internal and backup external hard drive suffering fatal crashes at the same time is relatively slim.

The reality is that until Blu-Ray or HD-DVD writers are more reasonably-priced and better-supported, an external hard drive is the only practical option for somebody with a very large library. My own iTunes library would take over 200 standard DVD-R discs to do a full backup of.

[Eric Lewis]

so with timemachine..will itunes be incorporated?

[studogvetmed]

so with timemachine..will itunes be incorporated?

Time machine should be able to back up anything you tell it to as long as you have the hard drive space to do it.