I overwrote a bunch of mp3 folders and need them back

May 4, 2008 10:10 AM

I was transferring a lot of mp3 folders from my laptop (MacBook Pro) to an external hard drive (160 GB iomega) and overwrote some of the folders, losing a lot of mp3s in the process. Help!

Already on the hard drive were folders with the band's name and then subfolders with the various albums in them. I assumed that when I transferred the folders from my laptop to the external hard drive that if there were folders with the same band name on both my laptop and external hard drive, but with different album subfolders, that they would integrate and the result would be all the album subfolders from both sources under the same band folder. Instead, the band folder from the laptop completely replaced the band folder already on the external hard drive and I lost whatever album subfolders were already on the external hard drive.

I am having a hard time explaining this coherently, so I will try to briefly give an example of what happened. On the external hard drive is a folder called "Animal Collective" with has the album "Sung Tongs" as a subfolder. On my laptop is a folder called "Animal Collective" which has the album "Feels" as a subfolder. I thought that when I saved the laptop folder onto the external hard drive that the result would be a folder called "Animal Collective" with both album subfolders inside. Instead, the laptop folder "Animal Collective" folder completely replaced the external hard drive "Animal Collective" folder and I've lost the subfolder "Sung Tongs."

This just happened and I haven't touched anything (the external hard drive is still connected to the laptop). Is there a way I can reverse this or retrieve the folders that were overwritten? Is there any other information you would need to determine a solution? Thanks in advance for any help.

posted by Falconetti to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Macs do this (no. 29), and I'm certain it screws over every switcher from Windows. You might have luck with something like Data Rescue II or other file recovery software, but I wouldn't count on it.
posted by holgate at 10:22 AM on May 4, 2008

This is what Time Machine is for. Are you using MacOS 10.5?
posted by mumkin at 10:25 AM on May 4, 2008

I have Time Machine but will it revert an external hard drive back?
posted by Falconetti at 10:30 AM on May 4, 2008

Time machine can back external drives up - in fact, I'm going to be using it very soon to restore the contents of an external drive with all of my music that just belly-up'd - but you have to specifically tell TM to back it up. If you didn't, you're probably SOL.
posted by Tomorrowful at 10:33 AM on May 4, 2008

Yes, what Tomorrowful said. Sorry.

For what it's worth, if some of the music that you overwrote was purchased from Apple, they will make it available to you again on a case-by-case basis. My girlfriend had a drive failure, wrote to whatever complaints dept. handles such things at the iTunes Store, and was able to re-download all of her purchased tracks at no cost.
posted by mumkin at 10:54 AM on May 4, 2008

Thanks for the help everyone. Luckily, most of the albums I overwrote are also owned by friends so I can replace the majority of them. The most annoying is that some shitty Sonic Youth B-sides album overwrote like 20 Sonic Youth albums. Well, I learned a valuable lesson, I guess.

And of course if anyone coming along has any other suggestions, feel free to add, but it looks like the situation is clear.
posted by Falconetti at 11:40 AM on May 4, 2008

You don't have any of this stuff on your Ipod, do you? Because you can copy the files from that back to your computer with a number of freeware tools like yamipod.
posted by mattholomew at 5:36 PM on May 4, 2008

while skipping abuse for your choice of iomega hardware you may be able to recover the 'overwritten' files on a PC with some serious recovery software on it ~ depends mainly on how [not just format type but literally how] the external drive was formatted prior to exposure to your mac = worth a shot
posted by 0000 at 8:17 PM on May 4, 2008