Hi,
Some time ago I had a hard drive failure on my PowerMac Pro Quad processor.
No problem I thought as I was using time machine however, when I went to re-load from an earlier back up iTunes failed to load completely, the song titles are the but with approx 50% of them I get the error "original file could not be found" also in many case I get the iCloud sign but with a ! in the cloud, can ANYONE help me as this is a disaster for me.
Thanks, BlackRockGuy
Presumably you are doing the restore from the Time Machine backup correctly:
06/2014 ChrisCA post: Restore iTunes library from Time Machine backup - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6374283?answerId=26104480022#26104480022
Do you have a strictly simple iTunes setup with iTunes running off an internal drive and default settings or do you have something fancy with networked drives? Have you changed any configurations recently?
iTunes doesn't directly inventory your files. It keeps a listing of which files to play when you play a particular track and if something renames, relocates or otherwise changes the location identification for a file then iTunes doesn't know about it until you try to play it and then has no idea where it is. If you are using an old database with updated file locations this could cause it to break. As you can tell, for us to really determine what is going on will require detailed information about your library structure and we're probably better off telling you how iTunes works and you checking why it isn't working in yur particular case.
Thank you for your prompt reply
Yes the iTunes library was on the internal hard drive that went bad, there were no special settings just an alphabetical list of the music (much to my shame),
typically I had put off doing a proper sort out and just relied on time machine.
After running the back up all the files and Apps. seemed to load ok and iTunes loaded showing the total number of tracks 18,000+ including the track names but when I attempt to play some of the tracks I get the error "original file could not be found". I estimate that this is effecting approx 40% of the files. I always thought that a time machine back up was just that but obviously either I am doing something wrong or the files are screwed!
Incidentally I have just noticed that all the back ups between August 2013 and 4th. June 2014 will not open (the back-up date I used was the August one, which I had assumed had the best chance of repairing iTunes. Could it be that in using the the earliest one I could have screwed up Time Machine itself? (The June back up is around the day I attempted the re-installation.
Sorry if the above is a little rambling! but the loss of nearly 7 years worth of music is not a happy place to be in.
Regards,
BlackRockGuy
HI, thank you for the link, I had a second attempt at loading iTunes and this has now worked and recovered the missing and faulty files. Problem solved for the moment thank you again.
BLackrockguy
Failure to Recover Backup of iTunes
