Here’s the situation. A friend of mine recently had a hard drive meltdown on his Powermac. His drive was kept a bit too full for a bit too long. He also lacked a backup. I know, how could I let him work without a backup? I didn’t know, I swear.
Anyway, he put in a new drive and recovered some of his stuff, but not all. A lot of what’s missing is on his Apple TV that he recently got. He’d like to get that media back on his computer where it belongs and start syncing once again.
If he’s willing to open it up, the procedure is fairly straightforward. The problem is he doesn’t want to rip the thing open and void the warranty. My question is to you, my gentle, clever readers, how does my friend get that music and movies back? The inevitable follow up is why this needs to be hard at all.
I had my laptop stolen once and emailed iTunes customer service about the situation. They granted me a one-time download of all my past iTunes purchases. Granted, this does nothing for your friend's ripped media, but at least their iTunes purchases can be recovered easily without having to rip open the Apple TV.
It's awful tempting to make him learn his lesson hard & make him void his warranty to recover his stuff.
Try here for info. I didn't read it all, but it looks promising:
http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/Beginners_Guide#Enable_External_USB_Storage
Also noteworthy:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=402016
http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/Main_Page
Let us know how it goes, eh?
Oops. I forgot to mention to see:
# 9 Enable External USB Storage
on the first link I gave you:
http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/Beginners_Guide#Enable_External_USB_Storage
Hey, just time for a quick comment before I head off to work, but you can do a Google search on installing SSH onto the AppleTV, then you should just be able to use an SSH client like Cyberduck to browse the AppleTV over the network and copy the media files back to your Mac. Good luck.
Use atv-bootloader to boot the AppleTV, then through a telnet session you can recover anything you want. Google "atv-bootloader" and you will find it.
Note that this method can recover any content but importing that content will be dependent on DRM (don't try to recover a rented HD movie, it won't play on anything but YOUR AppleTV).
Yet another problem with downloads - all the movies sitting on the same hard drive which will fail in a few years. Then it's time to buy your movies again.
If he's just trying to move purchases, he can easily move anything but movies as far as I know.
To move the other stuff, just in case he wasn't aware, all he has to do is select the AppleTV syncing option and through iTunes only select to take stuff off AppleTV and sync it backwards. I was able to do this with some television episodes I purchased. Apple Care said it couldn't be done but then I happened to run across the option on my own.
PT: That's what backups are for, definitely!
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