Has Vista Backup deleted all my music files???

Last night I opened iTunes to listen to some of the roughly 15 or so gigabytes of music I have collected & store on an external HD. But I got the nasty exclamation point for every song I tried to play. Browsing to my iTunes preferences, I saw that, yep, iTunes was pointed to the correct media folder on the XHD, the same one it's always pointed to. The XHD was functioning fine, too. I opened it and browsed through it to the iTunes music folder. There were all of the hundreds of folders ordered alphabetically by artist, same as always. The shock came when I began opening individual album folders: every single one was completely empty! Somehow, every individual music file on my external HD had been deleted. How on earth could this have happened?!?

Fore me to have manually deleted all these files would have taken hours, so it obviously wasn't a mistake. Yes, I've got 'Keep media folder organized' checked same as always, ditto for 'Copy files to media folder when adding to iTunes library.' This has not changed for years.

The only significant thing that's changed recently is that about two months ago I started using Vista to backup my C drive to the external HD weekly - the same XHD (500 GB) where my music lives. Is there any chance that backup deleted these files, perhaps to accommodate the zipped backup folders? I can't think of how else every individual mp3 file might have been deleted.

Regardless how it happened, how can I get these music files back?? They weren't on my C drive, so they weren't being backed up. System restore doesn't have a restore point that far back. WTF is going on?

Thanks for your help,
Patrick

 

Greetings, burnthisnow...

You might try some of the free Data Recovery tools listed on the front page - if you click 'Sort By: License', all of the freebies will be listed first...

You might also try your XHD's website, see if there are any solutions there...

As to why? My first suspect would be the Windows Backup - pretty obvious something went awry...

Keep us posted...

 

Thanks Caliban. For the moment I'm going to see if anyone can provide an answer to how this may have happened, but if it comes to it, I may have no option but to try to restore all these .mp3 files. So bizarre...