i wonder what theyd do if, say, he got a zune for christmas and tried to play all that music on it??

Mein Gott! That's fantastic, but a real fail for Seagate, in both hardware and customer service departments.

The Click of Death was an IBM Deskstar issue. I haven't heard of anything like that happening with Seagate drives.

I've been computing and backing up for twenty-odd years, and this sounds so improbable, I'm going to go make sure aliens didn't just land in the yard.

@CaliforniaCajun: Where have you been, mr. "expert"? Just google apple + seagate, or better yet, check the apple forums. Seagate is crap.

@CaliforniaCajun: I've had "click of death" style issues with even maxtors. Seems like some batches just suck.

@boandmichele: I wonder why, say, someone would buy a Zune in general. Sorry, couldn't resist. :)

@CaliforniaCajun: the click of death is a universal issue with hard drives.... segate is typically good in my experience, but no brand is flawless

THREE external HD's failed?

Yea, right. What was the guy doing, using the external drives as internal drives?

The same thing happened to me a few months ago. I sent an email to iTunes support and they let me download everything again, about 500 various songs and tv shows. I never backed up my stuff before but now I use Apple's Time Capsule and Time Machine. It all works flawlessly.

I was under the impression that you could do this easily without having to contact tech support to start with.

You can authorize up to 5 computers to have the music you've purchased, so it's just a matter of deauthorizing the previous harddrive wipe and reauthorizing it with the current installation, if you're working on the same computer.

the real problem was he didn't download DRM free files from bittorrent.

I am serious. The last music I bought was from columbia house, about 20 years ago.

/now that I think of it I don't listen to music very much anyway.

//if they want to make money, go on tour

@kable2: What does DRM have to do with this? If he'd downloaded his music from BitTorrent, he'd be just as screwed when his hard drives crashed -- except moreso, because there wouldn't be a convenient 3rd party who could give him his music back.

Also, if you happen to still be living in 2005, you might be interested to hear that you can actually buy DRM-free music. Imagine that!

"the three Seagate external hard drives he used failed"

...
How do three hard drives fail all at once?

My single backup drive sits on a shelf unplugged until I'm ready to use it again.

@CaliforniaCajun: Only reason you're associating the click of death with the IBM Deathstar is because it was the biggest clusterfuck of them all... that phenomenon isn't specific to any brand whatsoever.

This sux. I was within days of buying a Seagate external HD. I have a friend who's an engineer at Seagate, and he made recommendations what to get. Now I don't want to.

Every single HD manufacture has had clicky o' death drives. The Deathstars where just click en masse.

@spince: Reauthorization has nothing to do with redownloading purchases.

For what it's worth, this "redownload all your purchased iTunes stuff" is fairly standard Apple procedure. However, if I remember correctly, they'll only do this like once ever per account, so you really need to be desperate....and learn some ways to back up all your stuff (it ends up being cheaper in the long run, really..especially given expensive data recovery costs (which doesn't matter if you're home user or pro)).

[www.apple.com] go to Purchase(s) - missing > My hard drive crashed...

Oh, on a sidenote, Benny seems to have backed up to some faulty and not redundant hard drives. Maybe Benny needs to invest in a raid1..raid5..online storage (a la amazon s3)..?

I too have done this with apple. I had about 200 in purchases, maybe a bit more. Anyway, I sugget you use 3 DIFFERENT drives as opposed to 3 same drives. And your experience is exactly why I do this.

C.

@grayskyz: three different drives is a start, but hardly a solution. three different drives+some redundancy..then you're talking :D

:shrug: I'm glad they "reauthorized your purchases", but honestly why don't they have a business model where they just keep track of what you purchased, and allow you to re-download whenever you need to? Blown up hard-drive, ran-over iPod problem solved.

@AT203: i can only assume it's a licensing issue, even with drm. :(

Here's a fun fact I found out when this happened to me: I only had a few albums worth of songs I had downloaded from iTunes, so I wasn't really going to make a case about getting them again. However, all of those songs were still on my iPod. When I plugged the iPod into the new hard drive with what remained of my library, it said it detected I had songs on my iPod downloaded from iTunes that were not on my computer, and would I like to transfer them over.

Done and done.

I've had the click of death on hard drives before and every time I've been able to "fix" it by slapping the hard drive as hard as I can against a desk.

Now understand this should be your absolute last resort before throwing it out and if it starts working, start uttering prayers of thanks and get your data off asap.

Yay, Apple. It's always nice to hear stories of companies doing good. :)

Hmmm...I couldn't get Apple to refund or re-enable TWO songs I was downloading when the laptop hard drive crashed--DURING the download. Their response? "It's our policy to never refund or re-enable due to hard drive failure. If we do it for you, we have to do it for others as well." I didn't even want the entire music directly I'd downloaded over the course of the year or so I'd had my iPod at that time, just two songs that I hadn't even completely downloaded yet.

I was in the middle of one download and the other was waiting. Interesting. I haven't used iTunes since and was finally able to get all my music off my iPod and backed up in a couple places. I'm not impressed.

well if he merged 3 drives to act as one via a software RAID application, it's possible to lose one drive and affect the other two. Merged drives (not as a RAID but via the RAID software) can crap out for sure.

Can someone clarify for me, what is the difference between authorizing and redownloading?

Does Itunes DRM require you to copy/send your music directly, as opposed to downloading it from itunes again?

Go WD. Seagate hd's aren't worth it.

Perhaps this is going to sound ungrateful of me, but this doesn't seem "above and beyond". It seems more like "reasonable". Apple must do this for customers who have purchased through iTunes or they will start to refuse to buy through them as a technical failure along with Apple's DRM restrictions would mean a complete loss of one's library.

It's great to see a story I submitted be posted!

I'd just like to say that these drives were all internal kits bought from Seagate, not external harddrives like someone assumed.

Of the 3 purchased, only 2 failed - one almost as soon as it was installed, and the second 18 months later. They weren't trashed, overheated, or otherwise mishandled. They were all used in the 'proper' way an internal harddrive should be used. The drives were each in separate computer systems in a range of configurations (intel, amd). There was no reason for the drives to fail so easily, and Seagate doesn't exactly tell you why a drive failed after you RMA it in.

I was mightily impressed with Apple's compliance in re-allowing the purchases to be obtained again, as the money saved from that act will encourage me to buy from them again in the future. :)

While it may not seem "above and beyond" for Apple to do something like this, compare it to the upcoming removal-from-service of the Microsoft DRM servers, essentially "taking back" the music the "sold" to their customers since it won't even survive an OS updzte after that.

Kudos to Apple on this.

thats great of apple and all, but its not like it costs them to reproduce digital copies of the music. they'd best offer digital replacements like they did.

If this isn't expect behavior of a paid download service, why are you paying for such a service? You clearly get nothing out of it. The ability to redownload in case of lost music is probably the one feature online music services can offer. Otherwise your paying for less than what you get for free with "illegal" downloads.

Since when is seagate in the data recovery business, they're probably offsourcing to either datasavers or ontrack.

Next time you get a hard drive, do a level 4 spinrite ( best 90 bucks you will ever conceive of spending ) on it before trusting data to it.

People should use an online backup service in addition to any on-site backup. On-site backups protect you for disk failure, but most things that will destroy a computer will also destroy a nearby external backup (fire, flood, electrical surges, etc.). I use Mozy -- $5 a month or $50 a year is a bargain and it backs everything up in the background. The first backup is usually a doozy, but it really is a great service.

If he would have bought his music through a retailer and ripped it to his pc (without DRM), he would have had a backup---the original. I don't know why people buy itunes restrictive music. I have never bought 1 thing from itunes and I dont ever plan to.

@CaliforniaCajun: Seagates SUCK. I constantly am pulling them out of our systems and swapping them for WD drives. They fail on average 1 every month, maybe 2-3.

The reason they didn't re-enable your The Office downloads is because they no longer have a contract with NBC Universal. NBC wanted iTunes to charge $5 and episode and Apple said no. You can no longer get any NBC or Universal TV Shows or Movies.

Uhhh...how about a DVD burner and a 'physical' backup that way?
I've got 5 or 6 backup DVDs backing up my external backup HDD.

I just took advantage of this "feature" this week. I'm not sure I've even spent $100 on iTunes songs yet, but I lost them all when my backup hard drive crashed. I was in the middle of a system rebuild. I e-mailed Apple, and within 24 hours I had all my stuff re-downloaded. I got a very nice e-mail that had been clearly read and written by a human, too.

I learned my lesson from that HD failure. My husband and I are standing up D-link NAS, and my plan is to make periodic DVD backups of my iTunes library as well as my other docs. I lost everything in that crash. Not catastrophic, but a real pain in the ass.

LOL @ paying for music. That $500 could have been invested but instead it now sits in Apple and music exec pockets. Good one, ^5.

@Rando: Inorite? The fact that he spends money, over the course of a few years, on things that he enjoys is just hilaaarious. Money that's invested never ends up in the pocket of an executive fat cat, and it's not like there's any chance of loss there! With the soaring value of the dollar, and the responsible folks running corporations, well, I can't imagine why anyone would hesitate to pour money into the stock market, and if not the stock market, maybe real estate. And, given the context of his post, we have more than enough information to assume he _needs_ to invest. ^5, indeed.

Also, I wish data recovery costs would come down, or there was hard drive insurance offered by manufacturers. I understand why it's so high, but I would gladly pay more upfront if it meant I might be able to get some data back at a reasonable price if the drive failed during the course of the warranty, at least

Solid state FTW.

I'm confused. So, was he using all 3 Seagate hard drives at the same time and they all simultaneously crashed? Or did he continue to purchase Seagate drives even after they had been failing on him.

If it's the first scenario, then I smell a rat. If it's the second scenario, I smell a dunce.

@Zelucifer:

Authorizing is allowing a computer to play an iTunes purchased song from a different account or machine. For example, if I download a song and my boyfriend wants a copy to, I can pop it on a flash drive, transfer it to his PC and then authorize his iTunes to use that song.

Re-downloading is just that. In this case, he had the songs and lost them... and Apple is allowing him to download them again.

@dakotad555: Yeah, and SOOOOOO cost effective right now. Over $1k for 64 GB of storage? No thanks. You can buy a whole lot of 1 TB externals at that price.

I had two external drives in less than a week. One Seagate and one Western Digital. These things just happen. They were both in CompUSA brand enclosures which had ZERO ventilation, so I imagine that's what did it for me.

@Rando: You know, while people on this site seem to have this mantra of "invest ALL your money." even investment houses will tell you that you should save SOME money for yourself to make yourself happy.

500 over the course of 2-3 years is not bad for something he loves.

You have any games on that computer of yours you are using? Same can be said toward you, unless your stealing them in which case you have a whole nother set of issues that we need to address here.

@dakotad555: Good thing solid state drives have such a low failure rate.

Oh, wait.

As some other posters, I don't see how this is a "story." Apple did what they should be doing for everyone, nothing special.

Perhaps an article highlighting the fact that they only allow you to do this once a year, and don't *have* to allow you to do it AT ALL per the ITMS EULA/service contract is in order.

It is one thing to tell people that they need to back up their files, and I don't have much sympathy for those who don't back up needed data, but this is the one reason I don't use ITMS.

It doesn't help that Apple acts like THEIR hardware never fails on its own.

EXACTLY WHY I STILL LIKE OLD FASHIONED CDs!!!!

This whole downloadable music crap has got to make this kind of "service" normal, if they aren't going to let you have some sort of non-volatile copy.

IF someone purchased a download, that has to be permanently allotted to that person. Period. You should be able to go back and re-download it at any time.

Otherwise, it's BS.

We were using Gateways with Seagates here a few years back, and about 6 months after we all got our new computers they started failing. It was pretty amusing in a way that each day someone further down the row of cubes had their drive die. I won't touch Seagates anymore.

Also: Click of death was a common problem with Iomega for awhile (Zip drives, not hd's, but same name).

Nice job by Apple. This isn't a one time thing either, I believe they have a quiet policy regarding this.

Still, there is a way to back-up to DVD for