Recuva and itunes

[thepapercrane]

I'm not 100% sure as to what happened, but my other half was tidying up the laptop and needless to say 98% of her music in itunes got deleted. She was deleting the stuff from within itunes... It also deleted it from the folders and subfolders? Gone. She didnt know it was going to remove the stuff in windows folders with it.

 

It wouldnt be that big of deal except about two years ago we decided to get our music safely and stuff So we pay for our music via the itunes store.

 

I ran your program once, on the quick scan and it did find some of the stuff she did delete and it was restored (sort of?! the naming conventions of them were undecipherable e.g. "dcm195.m4a", "dcm012.m4a" etc, etc. or something like that) to a folder we told it to goto... but once we dragged and dropped those weirdly named files into itunes it knew what they were and had song/artist names and stuff.

 

However, we are a little more concearned about the purchased stuff? It didn't find ANY of the stuff we purchased? I ran recuva again with the deep scan and it took all night. It did find alot more audio files but the new files that look like they might be them, have a path of "C:/ (?)" ?

 

So...

 

I selected those to restore and headed to work. I'm hoping when i go home i'll find the purchased music. but my gut is telling me its not them.. Such an optimist eh?

 

Is there anyone here that can tell me if itunes files purchased thru the itunes store are going to be recoverable or not? I may have to spend the day to mentally prepare myself to tell her they are gone

 

thanks all.

[JDPower]

Files are files, doesn't matter where they were purchased from. I hope you are not recovering them to the same disk/partition you are scanning though or you could be overwriting the same files you want to recover.

[hazelnut]

Also have a read here of Dennis's experience

 

http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=23991

[DennisD]

I'm really sorry to hear of your disaster with your music.

 

It might help you find what you're looking for (U2 pun not intended) if you know the way iTunes stores your music.

 

First thing is to set up Recuva in the manner described in the thread hazel linked to, and then you should have a familiar file structure in front of you.

 

iTunes by default uses your "C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\My Documents\My Music\iTunes" folder, and then inside that folder you'll find a folder carrying the name "iTunes Music", and inside that folder you'll find another folder carrying the artist or bands name, and then inside that folder you'll find another folder carrying the album name.

 

The other thing is iTunes stores the "cover art" in a separate folder called strangely enough "Album Artwork", and inside that folder is another called "cache". Inside that folder you'll find another folder with a "salted" name, or number.

 

But even that isn't straightforward as inside there the artwork is stored in numbered folders, and inside each numbered folder are more numbered folders, and then, as you've probably guessed, inside there, more numbered folders which contain a completely unrecognizable numbered file like this .. "A1BB9D86B0D79F64-3127E1DF7697FF60.itc2"

 

If you can recover all that you'll be very lucky, but if you do get some albums back you can install the artwork yourself with what I think is the best Mp3 tag editor out there, and it's free..

 

Download Mp3tag:

 

Hope that may help.