Music folder on external hard drive suddenly empty?

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Music folder on external hard drive suddenly empty?

I hope someone can help as this is driving me mad, I have no idea what has happened.

I store my iTunes library on a Seagate external 1TB hard drive. On plugging it in yesterday and navigating to my iTunes library my music is listed but every single track has an '!' next to it, and the message 'unable to locate' when I try to play anything.

At first I thought it may be a glitch, and as I know the route of the library I checked this in preferences and it was still correct, so when given the locate option I tried to link the library back to the correct location. It was at this point that I realised my music folder was totally empty? I have over 2000 songs in my library!

I've since tried the hardrive in a windows machine and the same problem exists there, a totally empty music folder. I've also checked for hidden files and this did not help, and the trash is also empty.

Does anyone have any idea where my music has dissapeared to and if it's possible to recover it?

I'll keep my fingers crossed for your replies.

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5)

Posted on Oct 20, 2013 3:36 AM

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Answer 1

nbar

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Oct 20, 2013 3:54 AM in response to T-12

Does the external drive mount when you connect it? If it won't mount, the drive has most likely failed.

Check in disk utility.

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Answer 2

T-12 Author

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Oct 20, 2013 3:59 AM in response to nbar

Yes the drive does mount and everything else on it can be accessed fine, pictures, videos, doc etc, even the itunes folders are there just no sub folders within the music folder?

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Answer 3

nbar

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7,019 points

Oct 20, 2013 4:03 AM in response to T-12

Unless you have a backup, there is no way to recover this data if you already checked your trash and other locations on it. There are data recovery services which are costly and not guaranteed to work. One thing I can say, if you opt for this method, the more you use the drive, the less likely it is any data can be recovered. Best of luck.

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Answer 4

T-12 Author

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Oct 20, 2013 5:00 AM in response to nbar

Thanks for the reply, at least I won't spend the rest of the day searching for the files I suppose. I do have a folder in the iTunes folder called backup if this is it I'll have to research how to go about it. Would you trust the drive itself after this, as it seems very random to just delete all of my album folders?

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Answer 5

Teribus1

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Oct 25, 2013 6:39 PM in response to T-12

Hi I had a similar problem when my computer guy uploaded my data to an new PC. I though I had lost some tracks. I have forgotten just where in my documents or my music?? but there was a list of files with alpha numeric numbers which I copied and pastwe into my ITunes library and he presto.

If you open a track on your library and go to "Get info" you will see at the bottom in small print the file file name eg; dc454.

It is still in my music as Itunes is only the tool to play your music as opposed to Nero or Windows player etc.

Hope this is some help??

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