itunes ate itself.
September 29, 2008 10:18 PM Subscribe
iTunes just nuked itself....again. Help me figure out what's going on, and why this has happened.
My itunes library has nuked itself twice in just as many months after several years of faithful service.
Symptoms+information:
-Start up itunes, little dude starts looking for the library file (is this the xml file? i will refer to it as such until corrected).
-All my song-files are still in their directories, fully intact.
-The .xml file just shit itself and won't be read when itunes opens, and then gets stored as "Itunes library (damaged)."
-i am on osx, using itunes 7.7.1
I was somewhat okay with this happening the first time, because it had been fine for literally years, but yeah, twice in two months gives me pause. Needless to say i am not looking forward to manually going in and reentering all my new music from the past six months each time this happens. It takes a freaking while.
What could be causing this damage?
How can i backup just the .xml file (or other necessary files) every couple hours or so? I don't think i need to backup the rest of the music this often, because each time it is still there, itunes just doesn't realize it.
Is there a faster way to re-enter everything into itunes?
My itunes library has nuked itself twice in just as many months after several years of faithful service.
Symptoms+information:
-Start up itunes, little dude starts looking for the library file (is this the xml file? i will refer to it as such until corrected).
-All my song-files are still in their directories, fully intact.
-The .xml file just shit itself and won't be read when itunes opens, and then gets stored as "Itunes library (damaged)."
-i am on osx, using itunes 7.7.1
I was somewhat okay with this happening the first time, because it had been fine for literally years, but yeah, twice in two months gives me pause. Needless to say i am not looking forward to manually going in and reentering all my new music from the past six months each time this happens. It takes a freaking while.
What could be causing this damage?
How can i backup just the .xml file (or other necessary files) every couple hours or so? I don't think i need to backup the rest of the music this often, because each time it is still there, itunes just doesn't realize it.
Is there a faster way to re-enter everything into itunes?
Agree it sounds like disk damage. What does Disk Utility report?
posted by olecranon at 1:34 PM on September 30, 2008
posted by olecranon at 1:34 PM on September 30, 2008
itunes keeps its library index in a binary file... should be a .itdb under users/you/music/itunes/. The xml file is actually itunes' own backup of the binary file, in case it somehow becomes corrupted. When the binary file is corrupted, itunes renames it "... (damaged)" and re-builds the library index from the xml file. If you're getting the error message followed by an empty itunes, I'm guessing that a) both files are corrupted, via disk error or something, or b) it's looking for the library somewhere it's not. what are your settings under preferences:advanced?
posted by Chris4d at 5:32 PM on October 1, 2008
posted by Chris4d at 5:32 PM on October 1, 2008
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######posted by troy at 10:26 PM on October 9, 2008
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Time Machine will have a backup of the library (which is not the XML file) if you're running Leopard. If you're not, it should be straightforward to add a cron task for it.
posted by kindall at 10:36 PM on September 29, 2008