Hi Andy, I’ve created ticket #14733 for this.
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@iamwappie, as a fellow user you have my sympathy. Without wanting to add to your woes, is it possible you have a backup of the music files which might be copied over the current mess ? Even if it is somewhat out of date it may be less work to add recent additions again. If not, forget I ever raised the topic.
I know this might be too late but to anyone out there who thinks a NAS is some sort of magical device that removes the need for backups then you need to think again.
I’ll shout this as I have done so many times.
Make sure you have backups of all your data on another medium and preferably duplicated at another location too.
A NAS IS NOT A BACKUP UNLESS THERE ARE OTHER COPIES OF THE SAME DATA AVAILABLE ELSEWHERE!
VALUE YOUR DATA? THEN MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP OR MORE THAN ONE EVEN.
It’s that simple. Software has bugs, hardware has failures and humans sometime miss important things…users and developers alike.
You learn something new everyday even if you don’t want to.
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You’re absolutely right that a NAS is not a backup solution. Delete files and they are gone forever. House burned down? everything gone also. Therefor I used Crashplan on the NAS to backup data to the cloud. I selected all family pictures, personal documents, family movies but didn’t select my music files. Why? Plain stupid now I suppose of course. Just maybe didn’t think the likelihood was that high of me consciously destroying the audio file structure and that music can always be downloaded again. Now that this has happened I change my mind on impact …
Hard lesson learned. Now fixing the damage and then add it to the backup
There are of course caveats to using things that are automated backups like crash plan (assuming you use that automation) and that is that backup frequency can be a double edged sword…hence running 2 or more backups with gaps between critical moments is always desirable…nothing worse than backing up a corrupted or compromised data area over a working one and not being able to get back again as your backup regime was too aggressive.
Backups are sometimes hard to get the balance right.
I have a manually forced copy of everything to another volume in the same NAS (DS1813+) and a manually copied version of that to another NAS (DS713+) just for the music.
Should I choose to test a different setup I can test it on the 2nd backup and if it messes up I can recopy from the 1st backup before ever risking my production data.
I also at times when making large changes actually remove the disks from my 1st backup completely from the NAS just to make sure its really not likely to have anything happen to it.
Disk these days is way cheaper than re ripping time for 1000’s of CD’s or even 100’s of CD’s especially if you don’t keep your original collections media.
Online options like S3 and Glacier etc are good for smaller high value needs but if you have to restore GigaBytes it can be expensive.
I’ll stop the soapbox now…I hope you get your structures back to ideal without too much trauma…lets hope that others will take away something from this … and you have uncovered a bug it seems - the hardest way, but hopefully will be a win for others despite some pain for you.
I totally agree regarding the backups.
I had some thoughts about how the storage options and “Add Folder” functionality might be streamlined.
In my opinion it would be better to just have one button to add a folder. Also different icons for watched folder and organised folders could help. I made some mockups to demonstrate this.
This is how the storage options might be more clear. It is not perfect, but you get the idea:
You just have 1 button to add a folder. If you click it, the following window will appear:
You won’t be able to create an organised folder by mistake. It will be hidden under “Advanced Options”.
I just realise: Even iTunes Library could be added to the tab menu in the “Add Folder” window. I know this is not really a folder. But maybe there is a nicer wording than “add folder”. For example “Add music”.
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UGH… we have to keep this “organized folder” feature around until we have another solution for imported music (the stuff drag and dropped to the app).
However, we are in the process of killing it ASAP… I’m hoping by the next minor release it’ll be gone.
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