How can I get all my itunes files from multiple computers onto my new PC?

Question

Managing my itunes files (music,video,tv shows, iphone apps) is a really hard task and I have not had much luck yet. If I had a single PC for the rest of my life with the same hard drive, it would work great but infortunately it cannot be that simple. I just build a new PC as my old hard drive crashed with all my itunes purchased songs, video, etc.

So is there anyway to get itunes to recognize that I own all them and let me re-download everything? As I see it so far, it knows what I own by my itunes account login (it knows if I purchased a file or not ever) but does not seem to let you just re-download everything to a new PC or new hard drive. I realize I should've had backups but I didn't. My backup plan is a work in process and it is getting much better but that doesnt help with my situation at the moment.

So I am asking for any help, ideas of how to retrieve all my previous itunes purchases?

Answer 1

Sorry, but you can only download purchases once, here's a source on the Apple site.

Except for Apps, which you can redownload with a little bit of messing about.

It might be worth emailing them to ask for some kind of exception - but I wouldn't get your hopes up.

I'd recommend you look up hard-drive recovery questions elsewhere here on Super User and see if you can't recover some of the files from your old drive.

Answer 2

As per Apple general policy you are only allowed to download your purchased music once. Nevertheless, some people have had good results by writing to Apple Support and explaining the situation; Apple allowed them to download their purchases again.

Answer 3

I use photorec, it is a command line tool in Linux. It is pretty good at file recovery and have used it to recover deleted file on many occasions. It would be a good a idea to read a lot before you being the recovery. As recovery can take a long time, the more you know about how the recovery process works the quicker you can recover specific files.

If you need to recover specific files on the partition, even an unformatted partition. Photorec allows you to recover file on an unformatted partition. It reads each and every sector looking for file descriptors. It will require a lot of extra space to do all this recovery. You need to have at least the same amount of free space as your partitions to which the recoverd files are written. You can filter for specific file types, but esentially it will recover each and every file on the partition. It does not recover the file names, and renames every thing so you will still have a lot of work going through every file to find the ones you want.

Some recovery Linux distros are only like 120mb do download. TRK