Cant get files back

David May shared this question 5 years ago
Need Answer

Today I had to erase and rebuild my drive. So my iTunes library is blank on my internal hard drive. But all my media is still located on 3 external drives that I spanned previously. How do I recover these files so that I can use them in its

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Thanks for getting in touch. I'm so sorry to hear about your hard drive failure.

The fix for this is essentially starting in over in iTunes, and this is pretty easy to do without having to copy all of your files back to your internal drive.

To do this, you can go to the Advanced Preferences in iTunes, and uncheck "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library". Then, you can drag the stuff in from the external drives and iTunes will reference them from their current location rather than copying them back to your internal drive.

When you've added those files, you can go back into the Advanced iTunes Preferences and recheck that setting for normal use.

Please let me know if you have any other questions or run into any issues.

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