I’m running a Drobo S with 5 * WD 2TB drives in it, firmware 2.12. It hosts my iTunes library over FW800 connected to a Mac Mini running Lion.
iTunes streaming was really jittery today so I rebooted the Mac Mini. When it came back online, it said the iTunes library was on a locked disk. Went in to disk utility and tried to verify it, but was told it would need to be repaired.
Tried a repair, but disk utility says : Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
What I’m wondering is, do I have any option other than to make sure I’ve got a good backup and flatten the whole thing? I’ve got about 6TB of stuff on here so whether I need to start from scratch or move stuff to another setup, its going to take ages, so am wondering what my options are?
Thanks.[hr]
Forgot to mention that Drobo Dashboard isn’t reporting any problems at all and have a big chunk of disk space free.
hi, can you play your itunes music via any other standalone software player (or are you tied into the itunes player?)
if so, id say try using that other player to see if you get the same skippings
from what ive heard theres too many (features) of itunes that mucks things up (from what i heard)
something like if you plug in your ipod into a pc to back it up, it would wipe it or something
Some music library managers (iTunes, and WHS2011 up until recently) like to “fix” your music library for you - indexing it (good), and repairing bad/missing metadata (bad if it grabs the wrong metadata or you’ve put in your own metadata that you want to keep)
The iTunes “wiping out an iPod” has more to do with how iTunes manages and syncs the content. The assumption is most users have only one iPod, so allowing auto-sync will have the iTunes computer sync its library with the connected iPod.
If that’s not the case (or you’re just paranoid like me), don’t let iTunes automatically sync when an iPod is connected.
IIRC, iTunes shows a message somewhere in the corner that tells you if it’s still indexing your library.
Support have said that there’s records of some improper shutdowns, when osx has closed down correctly and without issue, but without the drobo being shut down first via the dashboard utility. This can apparently cause real problems with volumes.
The iTunes library has about 6TB of data so unfortunately offsite backup options are limited. With the 256k upload speed here on my uk broadband connection, it would take years and years to complete.
ah try to remember to safely shut it down via dashboard before the mac is shutdown.
by my calculations (times by x, divide by y and carry the 1) it might take you just over 6 months to fully replicate your data over the web (assuming most is not compressible data).
but once you have done it one time, subsequent synchrinisation will be MUCH quicker, since it only has to upload updated and new data.
(if your data is super important, then it’s probably worth having a 2nd copy of the data, eg i backup my drobo gen1 onto the gen2, and also have part of the important stuff backed up online)
one thing you could try do is to (virtually) catalogue your data or tunes into a few categories.
(eg just see if you can do that in your mind, rather than change anything physically yet)
eg:
a) files you dont have backed up and can not easily replace
b) files you dont have backed up but could fairly easily replace if needed
c) files you already have backed up/have originals which you could recreate from
then you could mark just the a) files and folders to begin with, which will not take as long to backup
and in the mean time you can start analysing your b) files.
by the time a) is complete, you can mark the b) files
and then move onto c) files as and when you can
(i dont know how itunes all works, but am assuming if you purchased an album from it, it should remember and let you get it again free if you delete it/lost it by mistake etc) in which case you could mark those ones as b) or c) depending)
Thanks Paul. In reality, I think it would take much longer than that as I’ve got Crashplan in place for my iPhoto library, documents etc and it took about 4 months to back up circa 500GB!
I’m looking at options just now as I have a Drobo gen 1 sitting here and also a 4TB Western Digital MyBook. The majority of my music is ripped from CDs, so that’s the stuff I’m least concerned about.
The majority of my movies are ripped from DVDs, so while those would be time consuming and a pain to re-rip, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. More are being bought from iTunes now so the balance is tipping in that direction.
I think the majority of my TV shows now are bought from iTunes so that’s the one directory I definitely need to have a backup of.
When everything was under 4TB it was easy, I’d use Carbon Copy Cloner to make an incremental backup once a week. But I’m starting to think the best option now is to buy some new disks for the Drobo gen 1 and do a weekly backup on to that. iTunes in the Cloud needs some investigation as I know you can stream from it so it keeps a track of your purchases but I’m not sure if you can re-download anything that’s been lost as I think Apple are fairly clear about backups being your responsibility.
Same here, though I have an autoloader. Took about 4 weeks - let it run overnight and needed to refill/empty the bins when they each batch was done. Averaged 30 min/disc, still beat manual load/unload.
I guess maybe if you have kids that are old/dextrous/poor/obedient enough…
that’s fair enough ascender.
just bear in mind that most overhead (i think) comes from lots of smaller files.
(if you try copying say a 1gig file onto a usb stick, then compare that with 1gig of say 1meg files, or smaller pics etc and you’ll see what i mean
for online, each file has to be hashed and saved uniquely and tiny overheads will all add up.
probably my estimate is wrong but give it a go with a couple of gigs with different types of data online as a test
bhiga: thats the 2nd time ive heard you mention autoloader - i keep getting intriged
it might take you just over 6 months to fully replicate your data over the web (assuming most is not compressible data).