[PRCJR]

Hi Gents,
Any Apple Mac mini magician in the Long Island
11705 Bayport  area willing to assist me w/ my exterior HD crash?
West digital made me erase my HD which contained all my music
Files and now I have a mess of meta data in j River and Pure music that has me all afluster! I'd make it your while w/a case or bottle of your favorite beverage! The distributer is right around the corner!!! Any evening or weekend at your convenience would work for me.
Many many thanks for anyone who can help.
Thank you,
Paul C, Bayport NY 11705

[JLM]

Little late now, but you did make a back up, right?

I have all my music on my iMac with an external drive serving as my Time Machine.  All my audiophile music is also on my MacBook which is also backed up on an external drive via Time Machine.  Every year I swap the drives out with the two kept in a safety deposit box (in case of fire/theft).  Plus it's all ripped from CD's that I keep.  That's a total of six backups for my audiophile (and favorite) music and three backups for the rest plus a backup computer.  The only redundancy I don't currently have is USB/optical cables, DAC, and preamp.  Not huge collections, but cheap/easy to do and I don't want to be without my music.

[Bemopti123]

Time Machine backups never worked for me.  Is your HDD a spinning one?  If it is what I suspect, you might be experiencing a possible HDD failure.  You need to specify what type of Mac Mini is it. How old is it.  I know of a good tech that charges not too much for replacement but as far as metadata, I do not know. 

[PRCJR]

Thanks for your responses fellas. I managed to - backdoor- some issues by downloading jRiver,# 22( apple support doesn't know of this software from Adam) which managed to give me a clean slate to work from.
I was able to re-establish my external HD WD My book 1TB, and began the long process of uploading my music again, about 500 cd's.

To answer your questions I have a 2012 mini running 10.85, Mountain Lion I believe, 8 gig Ram, I5, Samsung 250 internal SSD..

It seems my OSX became corrupted not my external HD. Called apple support, (very helpful" ) to reload 10.85. Naturally they wanted to upgrade
me to El Cap., but based upon what LJM advised, I didn't allow that to occur, thank you! And I will be getting a backup HD to avoid this mess. (not sure how to go about the transfer but I'll figure it out somehow). Any suggestions on the make and model would be appreciated.

So as it turns out I probably didn't have to Wipe my drive as the problem was a corrupt OSX! Isn't that just peachy!

I am almost back to normal, however I thought that when uploading I'm still pointed to the External HD and my music is all uploaded there, but I still have to go through Itunes to upload it and then it seems I have to Import each album into jRiver 22. If I remember correctly I don't remember having to do that. If anyone has some advice as to  if there is a better way to do this, I'm all ears!!
Thanks Guys, I really appreciate your help.
Regards,
Paul

[JLM]

If you have your library stored on the HD in your computer, it's just a matter of switching external hard drives and forcing a Time Machine backup to the new drive (telling your computer it's a new drive).

BTW if you don't want to keep the external continuously connected Time Machine will prompt you every 10 days to make a backup.

[avta]

I use an external HD from Other World Computing. They specialize in Mac drives. Also, you might consider using Carbon Copy Cloner for backups. It's a very reliable program with good support should you need it.