[DCaddict]

The other day I was trying to perform a fresh back up of my iTunes music folder. Well, I ended up deleting my iTunes music folder by accident from my macbook pro (long story) which of course contained not just music, but movies, TV shows and applications. Ugh. There are no physical problems with the drive however.

I have my iTunes music folder backed up already but its about 3 or 4 months old.

My question is this. If I tranfer my old iTunes music folder back onto my macbook pro and then reconnect my iPhone/iPad to my mac--will my computer simply recognize all the items on those devices but *not* on my mac as "new purchases" and transfer them over? I noticed when I buy stuff on my iPhone or iPad that happens.

Otherwise, I guess I'll have to try to recover my data using Data Rescue III or something like that. I haven't used my macbook pro since the incident so hopefully that will help.

[Big Mac]

You're talking about your iTunes DRM restricted purchases right? Yeah, if you extract them from your iPod back to iTunes and rebuild your library, it may ask you to authenticate your ownership by prompting for your user name and password, but it should validate them as yours. As long as they're not modified in any way by the app you use to extract them from your iPod, they will be identical to the original copies and behave identically.

[DCaddict]

Yes, I am talking about my DRM restricted applications, movies, TV shows etc--(but some of my music no longer has the DRM). So, I just drag my backed up iTunes music folder to the appropriate place on my macbook pro and when I reconnect my iPhone/iPad it will transfer all the purchases I made *since* that backup even though I originally purchased most of this on my macbook pro?

Basically, all my newest purchases reside on one of those two devices--and I'd like to recover them. My fear is that when I reconnect my iPhone/iPad that it will erase the stuff I have purchased since my last back-up months ago.

Thanks for your help!

[Big Mac]

I think what you're saying is correct, although the way you're conveying it is potentially confusing to me.

If you're concerned that plugging your iDevice into your computer could cause the iTunes library on your computer's hard drive to be changed or deleted in any way, that cannot happen.

If, on the other hand, you're concerned that plugging your iDevice in will cause the files contained on it to be deleted if it is synched with a new, empty iTunes library on your computer, that very well could happen if you had iTunes set to automatically synch your iDevice, although iTunes should warn you before it does that and give you an opportunity to prevent it if it sees that files on your iDevice are missing from your library.

[DCaddict]

Sorry, I was having a difficult time explaining clearly what I wanted to do. I guess I was a bit frazzled. As it turns out, it all worked out!

I tranferred the 3 month old backup of my iTunes folder to the hard drive on my mac. That restored 95% of the content that I had before the accident. The newest stuff was on my iPhone/iPad however and I didn't want to lose that. So, I took a deep breath and connected my iPhone and to my great relief it told me that there were new "purchases" on my iPhone and asked me if I wanted to transfer them. I did that, did the same for my iPad and now almost everything is back to the way it was. Not only that, but all my playlists were somehow also restored. Whew! The only thing I lost was a few insignificant items that I didn't purchase through iTunes.

I didn't initially realize that the items on my idevices but which weren't in the backup would be detected as "new purchases" in this case and transferred back over--because I had previously had those items on my hard drive before the accident.

At any rate, thank you for your help!

[Big Mac]

Glad it worked out, friend.