TuneSpan skips all titles upon restoring

Oliver Busch shared this question 9 years ago
Need Answer

I've been using TuneSpan for a while now and am pretty happy with it. But now, my external HD I spanned to seems to need repairing/reformatting, so I decided to buy a new HD and move everything. When I do that (attempting to span directly from one Ext HD to the other, or by restoring the files first, TuneSpan skips all files with the error message "Didn't allow access to All Necessary Locations to Perform the Restore"... How can I salvage my 1000+ movies / TV Shows?

Replies (5)

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Looked around the other questions and found that there's a log in the console. It seems that the source HD (the one that's acting up) is at the source of the problem, since it has become Read-only. The log entry reads "TuneSpan: Inaccessible location: '/volumes/g-raid/etc.etc.' (r1 w0)"


This matches the error message OS X gives me, that the drive cannot be repaired and must be reformatted, but that I can still copy everything from it before I wipe it...


Just to make it more challenging... ;-)

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Thanks for getting in touch, I'm so sorry I couldn't get back to you sooner. I was traveling and in the woods without service.


In a case like this, it wouldn't be bad to simply copy the entire "Spanned Media" folder (or whatever you call it) onto the new external drive through the Finder.


After you copy them over, TuneSpan or iTunes won't know they moved and won't be able to play or locate them, but you can fix that easily with TuneSpan.


After you have the folder copied over, set the appropriated "Spanned Media" folder location on the new drive as the Span Location in TuneSpan and select all the tracks that you know are on that drive to span. Then, span them normally.


TuneSpan should find the files are already where it would have copied them to on the new drive and use them without needing to copy again. Then, it will quickly set the new location in iTunes for each track.


Please let me know how that goes or if you run into any issues.

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Hi Pico!


Thanks! In the mean time I had already copied many files to the Mac's HD, reimported them back into iTunes (miraculously, all metadata except play count stayed intact) and spanned them to the new location. Pretty cumbersome.


After reading your message, I wasn't sure how to specify a new Span location in the TuneSpan UI. So I tried copying the files directly from the old to the new location using the Finder, and set the new location in iTunes. This actually works well, and even leaves the play count intact. TuneSpan will not even let you re-span the files to the new location, since it already knows the new location. Much better than the 1st solution.


One thing though - using "Get Info" on the file in the TuneSpan UI reveals the old location in one place. I hope this doesn't lead to any problem down the line...

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It's hard for me to give any suggestions at this point since you've done stuff outside of TuneSpan and iTunes. I just can't know the state of your files, and what iTunes knows.


But, I can say that the location information you see in TuneSpan comes direct from the readable XML iTunes Library file. But, there are times that that file isn't totally up-to-date after a lot of files being move around.


If you have duplicate copies of files in multiple locations, it can be very hard to know what iTunes knows because the file may be playing from the "old" or "new" location.


Also, after re-importing files into iTunes, you may have created duplicate track references. Something to look into on your end.

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OK, thanks for your help! The bottom line is that my 1500 movies and 2000 TV Shows still exist, could be copied to a new external drive, and play fine in iTunes. That's a lot of luck for a faulty HD!


Thanks,


Oliver

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