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External HD...

ThePriceSeliger

Mushhead
Mar 31, 2004
4,860
0
Denver, Colorado
I just picked up a WD Passport Portable Hard Drive for my laptop since my harddrive was full of music and wasn't running well... I transfered my music, but lost about 100 songs, is that normal? If the songs were located in random places?

Also, will it make my computer perform any better?
 

jimmydean

The Official Meat of Ridemonkey
Sep 10, 2001
40,942
13,135
Portland, OR
I don't see how the physical location of the drive would result in data loss, but if it's Windows, anything is possible.

If you don't have enough swap space, then it can result in poor performance, but "having a lot of music" shouldn't cause a significant performance hit.
 

Dartman

Old Bastard Mike
Feb 26, 2003
3,911
0
Richmond, VA
No it's not normal to lose files.

You may want to run a checkdisk to see if there are any bad sectors.

For better performance run the defragment utility.
 

binary visions

The voice of reason
Jun 13, 2002
22,092
1,132
NC
No, it's not normal to lose files. The only likely way this would happen is if you had data corruption to start with - either the files were corrupted somehow, or they were downloaded as bad files to start with.

If your files were taking up a significant portion of your hard drive and the drive was almost full, it could improve performance. Defrag might help now, too.
 

SK6

Turbo Monkey
Jul 10, 2001
7,586
0
Shut up and ride...
Somewhat slightly off topic...and yes I know the generic answer to this, BUT, What do folks do to back up music from their Ipod? I have had a catastrophic failure on one of our laptops that had my wifes music on it. Now they are only on her Ipod.
 

Dartman

Old Bastard Mike
Feb 26, 2003
3,911
0
Richmond, VA
Somewhat slightly off topic...and yes I know the generic answer to this, BUT, What do folks do to back up music from their Ipod? I have had a catastrophic failure on one of our laptops that had my wifes music on it. Now they are only on her Ipod.
I believe there are some utilities to get music files off an ipod.
 

Silver

find me a tampon
Jul 20, 2002
10,840
1
Orange County, CA
Somewhat slightly off topic...and yes I know the generic answer to this, BUT, What do folks do to back up music from their Ipod? I have had a catastrophic failure on one of our laptops that had my wifes music on it. Now they are only on her Ipod.
Plug in the iPod.

DON'T SYNC IT WITH iTUNES. WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T SYNC IT AND COME CRYING HERE BECAUSE YOU IGNORED THE WARNING (although it's not a good warning. There should be a big ass red stop sign or something in that dialog box when iTunes pops it up.)

Now use Windows explorer, navigate to the iPod and you should be able to see a bunch of hidden folders (assuming you have explorer set up to see them...)

Copy all those folders onto the hard drive of the laptop, go into attributes and unhide them if you need to, then unplug the ipod, go into itunes and add that folder to the library. Turn on the option to copy music to new location on import.
 

skinny mike

Turbo Monkey
Jan 24, 2005
6,415
0
Somewhat slightly off topic...and yes I know the generic answer to this, BUT, What do folks do to back up music from their Ipod? I have had a catastrophic failure on one of our laptops that had my wifes music on it. Now they are only on her Ipod.
i am currently in the process of backing up my music on dvd's, 6 to be exact. i'm also going to set my ipod up so if the comp does crash i can also just get the files from that.

i guess getting leopard was enough motivation for me to get around to backing it all up, so in case something happens when it's installing, i'm not ****ed.
 

Austin Bike

Turbo Monkey
Jan 26, 2003
1,558
0
Duh, Austin
I have ~400GB of music. I keep it on a NAS so that everything on my network can access it. I have a second NAS to back up the first.

The worst thing you can ever do is not back up your data. Hard drives are so cheap that there is no excuse. Between music, digital photos, software and video I have close to 1TB of data. If I ever had a catastrophic failure I'd be in real trouble. Occasionally I will make copies of the digital photos on DVD and take them to the office, so that if the house ever burned down.....
 
i was actually thinking of doing this with my computer as well...

i remember after i deleted about 80 gigs of raw footage that i had already turned into movies etc. and my computer functioned WAY faster...

i also plan on getting a laptop for school etc. but want to be able to have full access/editing capabilities on my info from the HD... they will allow you to do this without saving the project to the computer youre using right?

:lighten:defrag is a good idea... thanks for the reminder!:lighten: