The Everything's Broken or Lost entry

[dreamshark]

BROKEN:
* My Palm PDA (Tungsten E2) - dead after about a year and a half :-( Battery had been going downhill for months, finally went dead.
* Seagate external hard drive - dead after 9 months! Yes, it was plugged into a surge protector.

LOST:
* The irreplaceable proprietary cable that allows me to get pictures from my phone to my computer
* Monster Shuffle headphones and the iPod shuffle that was in them
* Sales slip/warranty for the hard drive (which had a 5-year warranty!)
* The mounting bracket for the far end of the cool retractable clothesline I was in the middle of installing. Set the bracket down a week ago and haven't seen it since.
* I also seem to have misplaced half of the clothespins that I ordered along with the clothesline. Or maybe I really only ordered one package? Clearly not enough.

WORKAROUNDS
* Shuffle and headset: I had a backup set. The headset was falling apart after a year of pretty much daily use, so I had bought another one. Along with a spare shuffle, just in case.
* Phone cable. I bought a USB card reader that works with the itty-bitty little memory cards they put in cameras. It works!
* Dead PDA. *sigh* It's going to be wrenching trying to migrate my data and favorite apps, but I broke down and ordered an Apple iTouch. It's not here yet
* Hard drive. Having some advance warning that the drive was going, I backed up my files and ordered a new drive, which arrived yesterday. I'm copying files onto it now.
* Clothesline: the end of it is temporarily wedged into the hook I had fastened to the garage wall for the temporary clothesline I was using as a beta test of the location.

TODAY'S AGGRAVATION
I had figured out some way to keep my iTunes library on the external disk to make it easy to move to a new computer. I restored my backup of the iTunes folders to the new hard disk. But... iTunes cannot find it and I cannot figure out how I got this to work the last time. I changed the location of the iTunes library in the Advanced setting, but couldn't get iTunes to use it. Finally tried dragging and dropping the iTunes Music folder onto the iTunes app - and it cheerfully started copying all of my music from the F drive onto the C: drive. I give up, I guess I'll just let it live there.

Now if I could only figure out what it did with all my play lists.

Comments

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

Dead PDAs. I feel your pain. Mine died recently, with all my phone/address info. I'm trying to start over again using my new cell phone.

If you figure out the iTunes thing I'd like to hear about it. I've been worrying about backing up my collection.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

The simplest way to back up your collection is to copy your entire iTunes folder to any backup media (DVD, thumb drive, hard disk, etc.). Be sure to include the "itunes Music Library.xml" file. You may or may not be able to get anything useful back out of that file, but it can't hurt to have it.

You can restore all your iTunes music in one fell swoop by simply dragging and dropping the "iTunes Music" folder onto the open iTunes window.

Then, you can SUPPOSEDLY get information like playlists, ratings, etc. back out of the XML file using the menu item File->Library->Import Playlist. Good luck getting that to work. I got all my playlist NAMES back, but most of the playlists are empty. And almost all of my ratings are lost. Lots of other people have had this problem too. I'm perusing some of the Q&A online.

I'm suspecting that I should have used File->Library->Export... to save the library file in the first place instead of simply copying the file, but I'm not sure.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

Thanks!. It looks like I need to replace my external backup drive, which hasn't been readable lately; my thumb drive only holds one gig and my iTunes folder is over six gigs.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

You can buy 8G thumb drives for under $20 on Amazon.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

Wow!