Lost Content???
Is it conceivable that Acronis could somehow failed to write content on a hard drive to an image of that hard drive? I have used various versions of Acronis over the years and, to my knowledge, nothing has ever been lost. In fact, I find it difficult to believe that that could occur.
Here's the situation. During a recent visit to our daughter and son-in-law I upgraded their laptop from Vista 64 to Windows 7 64. I made a complete image of the laptop hard drive as it was with the old system using my daughter’s copy of Acronis 2010. Everything went well, including verification.
I went through and selectively restored folders from the resulting image but could not find about eight thousand songs (a combination of songs purchased through the iTunes Store and copies of CDs) which she routinely played with iTunes. She says that she was playing these songs right up to our arrival—and doing so with no external device connected.
Only forty-five recently purchased songs showed up in the iTunes folder of the image. Needless to say, she was not happy.
Is there any way in which this content might have vanished during the imaging process?
This is exactly what I did. More precisely, when I couldn't locate the missing music files with a quick--and-dirty search strategy in the little time I had available at our daughter's place, I copied the image tib file, brought it home on a hard drive, and restored the entire old (Vista) system drive to one of my external drives here at home. I then picked my way through every even slightly large folder using FolderSizes but unfortunately the MIA song files were nowhere to be found.
Yes, hidden/system files were turned on in the original Vista installation.
Yes, but are they turned on in the current system?
When doing a full disk backup, the file settings do not matter, but when doing a selected files and folder restore, it does.
You may want to take a look at this knowledge base article http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1717 (esp. the User-Specific Troubleshooting section) from Apple to help clarify where iTunes stores it's settings and files, as well as troubleshooting if needed in the future.
Thanks James for the prompt response but I'm still left with an unexplained missing-content scenario. As I indicated above, what I did was to take a copy of the tib file home with me and restore the entire system drive to a folder in one of my external hard drives so that I could examine it carefully with FolderSizes. I certainly examined all of the iTunes-relevant folders—multiple times in fact. And I always keep hidden files visible turned on on my home machine.
So back to my original question—is this possible?
Have you had your daughter have iTunes scan her system for content since installing Windows 7?
Removing iTunes and re-installing will cause iTunes to scan the entire computer for media.
Additonal links for you: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1473#2 http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1408 http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1451
I too find it hard to believe that Acronis could "skip" any folders or files during a routine disk based backup. It has never happened to me. I own a small computer business and have done this hundreds if not thousands of times over the years on customers' systems with no issues.
Did you do a full disk based backup or did you select the partitions manually? Are you absolutely sure that the missing items are not located on external media? Has your daughter ever backed up her music library?
Hi James,
Thanks again for the response.
I just verified with our daughter that she did use iTunes on the new system to scan the content.
I had a look at the Apple links but I doubt that anything in them is going to prove relevant given that there is no folder anywhere in the extracted file system big enough to accommodate “8000 songs” as content, even in a very high-compression format.
Not including the nightly backups that I do of my main machine using Chain2Gen I'm sure that I have done and used many dozens of images with various versions of Acronis and never had a problem either.
Yes—it was a full-disc backup.
On the “external media” theory, that's by far the most plausible hypothesis for me but our daughter insists that she played some of the songs directly from her laptop with no external device connected “just before you arrived.” Adding to the difficulty here is the fact that her iPod was stolen shortly after we arrived for the visit! I don't believe she has ever backed up her music library and she insists that she had iTunes set to “manual sync only.”
Finally, compounding the “strangeness” here is the fact that the iTunes store only has a record of the forty-five most recent song purchases our daughter has made—thousands of other purchases have apparently disappeared entirely from their song-purchase data.
Again thanks! I really wish I could do something for our daughter but I can't imagine what it could be.
Not that this is going to help with recovery, but did she have another account (or use some elses) on iTunes to make any of the purchases?
It is extremely unlikely that a disk backup has skipped files, unless there is a file system corruption or explicit exclusion.
I'd bet that the purchased files were stored in some other unexpected folder but tracked in iTunes. The only way to make sure is to search the mounted image using windows search or other search tool, including system and hidden folders: *.m4* , *.mp*, .aac
Thanks Pat,
There was no evidence of file-system corruption in the original Vista installation and the only explicit exclusions were files with tmp-type extensions.
I tried the search you suggest, but unfortunately no luck.
I am finding it very hard to believe that there is any explanation other than that the files weren't there to begin with—our daughter, however, is a very meticulous and precise person and I find it almost equally difficult to believe she could be wrong on that issue.
Unfortunately, I don't think there's much more to be done! What really pours salt in the wound is that the iTunes Store only has a record of her forty-five most recent purchases!
Thanks again!