In the last couple of days I’ve been having heinous problems with iTunes syncing with my iPhone. I had been working under the assumption that the artwork was a problem. Since the upgrade to 9.0.2 the artwork started being a bit fruity. I had been getting odd things like the artwork for Buzz Out Loud being replaced for random genius mix.
Working with that assumption, I went into my iTunes library directory and deleted the artwork directory. Then told iTunes to get artwork. This should have worked….
After the artwork refresh, I had the Tenacious D album with the artwork from the Delicious D album. At this point, I figured I just borked something, so I did it again with the same problem.
At this point I gave up and just shredded the entire artwork directory and went without. When I bashed the sync button for my phone I was still syncing after 30 minutes with the spinning beach ball of doom.
My iTunes tracks are stored on a remote disk sat connected to a mac mini (my media center) elsewhere in the house, so I had a shot in the dark that the machine had locked up for some reason. Typically a heavy finger left on the power button will relieve the lockup condition on any given bit of kit, which it did. Back on my compy I tried to remount the shares so I could get my iTunes library working again. Oh shock of shock nada…. Looking on the mac mini the disk hadn’t mounted itself. Odd. The disk is some random mechanism housed in a firewire 400 box, so a power cycle is easy. Just like that it popped back up. Yay thinks I, large pat on the back for me, idiot….
After going through the sync, lockup reboot dance 3 more times I had the syncing feeling that the disk was not long for this world. Having had to do two disk recoveries last year at work I should have been expecting this. I’ve no idea how I’ve managed to keep the thing going for about 5 years almost 24/7, yes I know I’m pushing my luck. I’ve had the horrible horrible feeling that something nasty was going to happen sooner rather than later and I’ve been looking at replacements. Every time I look at external disks, I always look at firewire boxes, but the price of the things makes me say, maybe next month. Now I could go the USB route but having regularly used USB drives on PC’s I’m not a fan of them. My personal take is they’re slow and CPU hogs when compared to anything on firewire (3G iPod firewire circa 2003 fills faster than my solid state iPhone 3Gs on USB).
So at this point I’m looking at about £130 for a 1TB drive, the difference in price to drop to a 500GB is not worth the storage drop (about £30 less for half the space). The longer I leave it the more peril my data is in though. Up to the time the drive started going south I was selectively backing up data to an even older Lacie drive that I also use to backup my desktop. I suppose I could loose some data as I have the things I actually need on another drive, but recreating the rest would be a pain in the backside. Thankfully I’m a conscripted sysadmin (I’ll explain that eventually in another post) during the day, so I’ve borrowed a 2.5 inch 500GB USB disk from work, its normally used for shipping huge oracle dumps across Europe (the post office has much more bandwidth than any ISP). If it wasn’t for this fluke of daily pain, then I’d be furiously archiving to DVD…300GB to 4.7GB DVD-R yeh….no….. I don’t think the drive would last that long.
The take away from this rambling drivel….
