In a stunning reversal of my life-long good luck, my newish Mac mini computer blew its hard drive last month. This followed on the heels of the fatal crash of the five-year old iPod that had served as my back-up for thousands of songs, bought from iTunes, that were on my now-dead computer.
Two strikes - am I out? Is it too late to buy the back-up copy of my music that iTunes has been offering me, for about $250?
I searched the iTunes site in vain for any remedy, and finally, without much hope, made a phone appointment to speak to Apple support. The rep called, exactly at the appointed time, and said that iTunes would reload my music, gratis, to another computer. (No, I never told them I worked at Consumer Reports; we’re explicitly forbidden from using our affiliation for personal gain.)
I didn’t quite believe her. But soon after I brought home a new computer, an iTunes rep, Sandra, working on Mountain time, began to retrieve my songs and sending them to me via e-mail. I was thrilled—and also secretly convinced my good fortune was the result of good karma from skipping illegal downloads and buying all the songs in a way that supported artists for their work.
Sandra managed to retrieve a few hundred songs, but nowhere near the full load. I was puzzled, until I recalled that I had recently changed my iTunes account from a historic AOL ID to an Apple ID. This shifted my case to another rep—William, Pacific time—and escalated its complexity.
William downloaded the music to my old AOL account, but the system wouldn’t let me get to it. He then created a new phantom account for me, to which he began uploading songs, in batches of 200 or so. I happily spent a recent weekend at my desk downloading 1,686 songs.
All told I retrieved about 2,000 songs—everything I purchased, save for a few dozen songs (mainly free downloads) that I couldn’t retrieve because they were not available at the same price—or only the price of persistence: a total of 24 emails back and forth.
Here’s what I learned in the process:
First, my music collection is something I care about way beyond the actual cost of the music. I hand-picked those songs over five years, and they ranged from classic rock, alternative, techno, and trance, through Kanye West and the amazing jazz voice of Madeleine Peyroux.
Second, while Consumer Reports doesn’t rate tech support for iTunes, or other online music stores, my experience suggests it rivals that for Apple computers, which perennially receive high scores in our laptop tech support Ratings and desktop tech support Ratings (available to subscribers).
Finally, and maybe most importantly, I learned that even the lucky need back up, preferably in two locations—as my colleagues in the Electronics franchise urge. So once my musical horse was back in the barn, I thought I’d double lock the door by joining MobileMe, Apple’s cloud storage service, and buying a hard drive back-up. MobileMe uploads way too slow to store music, but I successfully backed up my computer to the hard-drive in less than a half-hour, via a Firewire 8 connection and TimeMachine – the backup software built into Apple’s operating system.
Meantime, I’ve got my music backed up on my iPhone and I’m listening to my rescued songs on shuffle and greatly admiring my own musical taste :) Here’s wishing you many happy back ups! —Ronni Sandroff, Director/Editor, Health and Family
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