Music Recovery

Somehow, I managed to screw up my music collection.

I was experimenting with recovering data from a semi-fried USB stick.  Then, with it still plugged in, I tried to sync my iPod music using MediaMonkey.

Little did I realize, all my drive letters had been mixed up.

The computer thinks that the USB stick is my F: drive (which contains the music), my music drive is G: (which is my iPod), and my iPod is H:.  So it tries to copy non-existent music from the stick to the hard drive.

This wouldn’t be a problem, but for some reason that probably made sense at the time, I configured MM to automatically erase files on the destination that aren’t in the sync list.  Unfortunately, this includes all the music in my collection which doesn’t exist in the empty USB-stick sync list.

Fortunately, I realized that it was taking a long time erasing files, so I was able to cancel it.  Then I fumbled around for a recovery tool, which I found (eventually) in Recuva.  So I’ve managed to (almost) get everything back; only 342 files (out of an original 20763) need to be recovered by other means.  That’s about 1.6% loss; it could have been much worse.