[GTALUG] speaking of Ipod data recovery.

[Seneca Cunningham]

As I recall, older iPods simply had an HFS or FAT (depending upon whether it was set up using a Mac or PC) filesystem with the music sitting as files in a directory.  Human-readable information about the music was stored in a database.  I have retrieved music from an old iPod of my own before, by simply mounting it and copying the files.  I had enabled the option in iTunes to have that iPod automatically mount in a visible manner, so that it could also be used as a USB hard drive.  The music files that had been copied on by iTunes had machine-assigned file names, but I was able to use the ID3 tags embedded in the music to change most of the names into more useful ones.  That process was used as an example in my 2009 lightning talk about the Perl module Image::ExifTool and file metadata.  After sorting out the files by type, I had renamed the MP3 files en masse using Image::ExifTool’s included CLI tool as follows:

    exiftool ‘-FileName<${Artist}_${Album}_${Title}_${FileName}’ *

The use of single quotes around the first argument to exiftool is required to protect the argument from the shell.  The second argument is intentionally unquoted.  What that particular command translates to is: change the name of every file at the end of the argument list to a new name consisting of the values of the embedded artist name, album title, song title and the old file name, with underscores separating the components.  The casing of all the elements of that command needs to be retained.  I kept the original, hashed name at the end of the file in order to protect files from being overwritten in the event of incomplete metadata.

The sixth generation iPod used a 1.8” hard drive, and the ability to easily access data from a sixth generation iPod hard drive that has been removed from its host is more complicated than the other generations, particularly if it is a 160GB hard drive (CE-ATA vs ZIF).  It is newer than my first generation iPod Nano, which I had at one point mounted and copied my music from.

Seneca

> On Sep 24, 2022, at 11:40, Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Sep 24, 2022 at 01:10:35AM -0400, Karen Lewellen wrote:
>> The IPod is an IPod classic. which is the 6th generation.
>> As for paying the $60, I still have no written confirmation on the details
>> price wise or process.
>> certainly open to other companies if some may exist in town.
> 
> It looks like the disk uses a ZIF connector, so data recover would require
> having an adapter for that connector, then having software that knows how
> to read the filesystem used by the ipod.  If someone can do that for $60
> I don't think you could do it for less yourself given the things that
> one would need to aquire and learn to use, assuming the disk is still
> working of course.
> 
> -- 
> Len Sorensen
> ---
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