Help: My Hard Drive Died. How Can I Legally Get My Music Back!?

Dec 9th, 2009 | By Jessica Dobias | Category: Copyright, Featured, Lead Article

broken-hard-drive When I worked at Apple the number one thing people would call or come into the store complaining about was how their screen on their iPhone was broken and how their hard drive crashed and they thought they’d lost all their music!

I don’t have a solution for a broken iPhone screen, but I do know a pretty cool little trick for getting your music back if your hard drive crashed. However, this trick is contingent on two things: (1) You have an iPod or iPhone and you regularly sync your music to it and (2) You purchase your music from iTunes. As many of you already know, I’m a big believer in copyright law and digital rights so I’ll be completely honest and say: I always purchase my music through either iTunes or Amazon MP3. Ah, shocker, I know.

I decided to make a quick little video tutorial for how to do this – although it really only takes a few steps.

Here they are in written format:

Plug your iPhone or iPod into your Computer
Stop the Sync Process
Go to File
Go to Transfer Purchases from iPod/iPhone
Wait for the transfer to take place

Pretty simple, I know. Maybe many of you already knew this, maybe you didn’t. I just thought it was a quick, easy and legal trick that could help anyone who may have recently suffered from a hard drive failure. I didn’t know this existed until I worked at Apple for a good five or six months.

Also, I highly recommend backing up your content on a regular basis. Here is how it can be done in case you’re having trouble.

For those of you who are currently studying for finals like me, thanks for taking the time to read! I hope you don’t have any hard drive disasters anytime soon! I hope this little post will remind you to back ‘er up! But just in case you forget, not all is lost…hopefully.