My hard drive crashed need help adding files back to iTunes

[ejlif]

I had a major hard drive failure in my iMac (3TB fusion drive quit working) I had all my music stored on an outboard thunderbolt drive. It's almost 3TB. I also saved the iTunes folder that has the playlists and things in it before the drive totally quit. I'm not sure how to go about putting all these back together. I had it really dialed in with all the art and thing organized and dialed in like I wanted it. I'm just not sure how to go about getting this set back up. Any help is appreciated.

[baddog]

Ok, I assume you did not have a recent back up of the hard drive in your iMac ( no lecture here )?

 

Assuming you have had the internal drive repaired with a new one, do you know where you had your iTunes database stored? Was it on the internal drive in the iMac or on the external drive?

 

More information on where iTunes stored its files can be found here.

 

Depending on where you stored the library files the answer may be different, but assuming you only had your music files on the external drive than you would need to do the following:

 

Launch iTunes.

 

Choose Preferences

 

Choose the Advanced Preferences Tab

 

iTunes Media File location - set this to the Folder on the external drive that contains all your music.

 

Depending on who you set things up initially you may wish to keep "Keep iTunes Media Folder organized" and "Copy Files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library" disabled. I don't know how you had it setup, you may in fact have had these enabled.

 

Last step, Choose "Add To Library" from the iTunes File Menu.

 

Navigate to the folder on your external drive where all the music files are located, and select it.

 

Next choose "Open" and it will begin importing all the files into your library.

 

Please note that I am as noted making some assumptions about how you have things setup. Also I would recommend you try this first by testing this one one music album first. Perhaps copy one album to the root of your external drive and select that folder as a test and make sure the results are as desired.

 

If you had the cover art stored in the iTunes database and cannot locate that database, then you will also need to use the "Get Album Artwork" command in iTunes to reload the cover art.

 

And most importantly it appears that you may have your iTunes library file, please consider this first. Since you noted you saved the iTunes folder with playlists, etc.. if so,and that is now on your new hard drive, you could try loading it into iTunes, to see if you can recover the entire music collection without the steps I noted above.

 

Here is a link that details how to do that.

 

Hopefully someone else may have some advise.

[ejlif]

Ok, I assume you did not have a recent back up of the hard drive in your iMac ( no lecture here )?

 

Assuming you have had the internal drive repaired with a new one, do you know where you had your iTunes database stored? Was it on the internal drive in the iMac or on the external drive?

 

More information on where iTunes stored its files can be found here.

 

Depending on where you stored the library files the answer may be different, but assuming you only had your music files on the external drive than you would need to do the following:

 

Launch iTunes.

 

Choose Preferences

 

Choose the Advanced Preferences Tab

 

iTunes Media File location - set this to the Folder on the external drive that contains all your music.

 

Depending on who you set things up initially you may wish to keep "Keep iTunes Media Folder organized" and "Copy Files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library" disabled. I don't know how you had it setup, you may in fact have had these enabled.

 

Last step, Choose "Add To Library" from the iTunes File Menu.

 

Navigate to the folder on your external drive where all the music files are located, and select it.

 

Next choose "Open" and it will begin importing all the files into your library.

 

Please note that I am as noted making some assumptions about how you have things setup. Also I would recommend you try this first by testing this one one music album first. Perhaps copy one album to the root of your external drive and select that folder as a test and make sure the results are as desired.

 

If you had the cover art stored in the iTunes database and cannot locate that database, then you will also need to use the "Get Album Artwork" command in iTunes to reload the cover art.

 

And most importantly it appears that you may have your iTunes library file, please consider this first. Since you noted you saved the iTunes folder with playlists, etc.. if so,and that is now on your new hard drive, you could try loading it into iTunes, to see if you can recover the entire music collection without the steps I noted above.

 

Here is a link that details how to do that.

 

Hopefully someone else may have some advise.

 

OMG Holy Sh*t that worked. I just re-added the library and it all came back. I got a couple of missing files exclamations but for the most part it seems like it's there and most of all my top rated songs are there. Thank you, I've got my fingers crossed that this isn't to good to be true. I have a huge library and things have gone missing in past, like I don't have CDs in there that I know for sure I ripped and they are just gone but I guess that is to be expected with so much stuff.

[baddog]

I am glad to hear you were able to by and large recovery your library. I know from personal experience what a nightmare that can be. You might want to consider backing up your iMac's hard drive and perhaps more importantly your music library on the external drive, if you haven't already.

 

If you should ever be so inclined you buy something such as this Plugable USB 3.0 toaster drive for $23.

 

You would then add in a "bare" hard drive to use for backups, you could have one for the iMac and one for the external drive and swap them in and out of the toaster as required.

 

A 4TB Western Digital NAS is around $160 these days. The same in a 3 TB unit is $120.

 

Regardless, not here to sell you anything, have a happy weekend!

 

Barr

[pixmator]

As my workflow[emoji835]️is large[emoji775]and fragil[emoji378] I use cloud solutions to save my data. On iTunes there is iTunesMatch which upload in cloud albums[emoji443]imported in aiff or wav format. It takes time to upload/download (low bandwidth to not stop you when using web) but it enjoyable to have our own music "safe". All that said, I have to upload several times from imported cd [emoji331]to play music[emoji444]