Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[JV]

I have a library of about 15000 FLAC files. I created this about 6 years ago. Originally using a bunch of hard drive shoved into a single PC. Once I worked out that, yes Virginia, heat does corrupt files, I shifted these files to a single RAID array network drive.

Over the years I've notice some of my favorite tracks would disappear from Media Center library, and when I checked the hard drive, they were gone from there also. So I'd re-rip them. I put it down to data corruption.

But I've finally got around to exporting the library as a text file, importing it into Excel, and running a report on missing tracks. It looks like about 2% of all my tracks have "just gone" over the six year period. But some of these are from CDs I've ripped within the last few months.

I can't put that down to the old system I started with. It's now on a new PC (running XP professional), latest Media Center,  new hard drives.

I think it's strange that the files are missing from both Media Center library and from the hard drive. I'm certain I'm not deleting these by mistake.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is it a known bug? Any advice would be gratefully received.

Cheers
Jon

[JV]

Mystery Solved!
Well I've continued to investigate, and just in case anyone else ever experiences this sort of thing, I thought I'd just make a note here:
- I use a Linux based Buffalo Terastation to store my FLAC files
- I use an Apple Airport Extreme to establish my home network
- I use an Microsoft XP pro PC to run Media Center

I had been using a couple of networked external USB drives to host my FLAC files while I waited for my Terastation to arrive with personal effects from overseas.

Seems likely that my "lost" files were down to illegal characters being used in some file names, together with some filenames that were over 27 characters long. I've juggled my FLACs between the Terastation and the apple formatted USB drives, and I've recreate my MC library quite a few times.

I had been having trouble sync'ing the USB drive to the older Terastation, so yesterday I upgraded the Terastation's firmware from 1.06 to 2.12 (or something like that) - this allowed the Buffalo to handle longer file names, and then ran some scripts on my Mac laptop which went through my FLAC files on the Terastation removing any possible illegal characters like: ",\#$?..., etc (for some reason my Mac could see files that Windows couldn't).

When I re-ran MC library import, 400 "new" FLACs were found - so they had been there all along - just invisible due to naming issues.

I'm not exactly sure whether this was a Linux, Apple, or Windows issue, but if you find you're missing files from both your hard drive and your MC library - and if you're running a mixed environment - maybe you should check your file naming by accessing your hard drive with its native OS.

[grandlulu]

Bravo Jon !