Survivors of the digital apocalypse

Wednesday, January 31st, 2007

Well it’s been over a day now since I began the music saving project after the external USB drive failed. I’ve salvaged more than 150Gb out of 238Gb so far. Every file saved is a relief. It could have been so much worse.

I ended up having to select no more than ten to fifteen folders at a time, and move them rather than copy. Any more folders, the chances are the old drive gives up and needs to be turned off for a while before trying again. Copying seems to take up far too much CPU power and takes way too long a time. I think the computer must have to check each file and mirror it in memory when copying, whereas just moving files involves less computational effort.

So far, I’ve noticed a few casualties—individual tracks rather than complete artist or album folders. Mariah Carey has taken a beating (truth told I can live with that and, let’s face it, the lady herself has had worse to contend with) and one David Sylvian track I can easily replace. The entire discography of Kate Bush survived except for just one track from her latest album, Aerial, which I have on CD.

I made sure my massive collection of Doctor Who audio adventures—which comes in at nearly 60Gb—was transferred early on, to see what damage had been done, and thankfully all the tracks made it through to the new drive. Same with my complete discography of Pet Shop Boys, which takes up even more space than the Who stories. My Madonna tracks beat everything else in terms of size, coming in at a hefty 80Gb thanks not only to all her albums and singles but also to a multitude of official and unofficial remixes and white labels.

The Cure, too, are one hundred per cent survivors of the digital apocalypse. I suspect all goths will survive any apocalypse, thinking about it, and they will likely thrive even in a nuclear winter…

I’m feeling happier. Of course, when the laborious transfer is complete I then need to delete any empty folders—I have a freeware program called EmptyFolderNuker to find those and do the job—and then I will defrag both the old and new drives. The old, because it might means previously unretrievable files are restored, and the new because, well, it’s good practice after a big data transfer.

Then I will set up iTunes again, and importing the tracks into a new database will take a long time. After iTunes has its new and complete database I will run my cover art program, iArt, which can restore the album art that resides in the music folders, as iTunes doesn’t always link the tracks to their artwork in my experience.

I don’t think it’s looking like the old drive will be usable. I had thought it likely only the Master Boot Record (MBR) was screwed up, but the computer keeps reporting an I/O error whenever tracks fail to transfer over. An I/O error is mechanical. So I will have a large new paperweight, though I may try a program I have that claims to be capable of restoring damaged disks. It’s called HDD Regenerator but as it took over four hours to check 350Mb—not gigabytes—yesterday before I cancelled the task, I think it’s best to try that painstakingly slow rescue job with the flaky USB drive attached to the laptop, left unattended to chug away in the guest room for a week or more…

Phew. Sometime while all this is going on I will attempt to feed my hungry ‘beta readers’ with some new story chapters…