Data Recovery from Your iPod or Digital Audio Player

If you’ve never thought about data recovery for your personal electronics—you know, music players, ebook readers and the like, maybe you should. Because you carry them around with you, your cell phone, music player and ebook reader are more prone to data loss than your computer. And if you’re like most people, you probably don’t have a backup to restore your data from, which is short-sighted when you consider how many hours you’ve probably spent downloading and arranging your music collection so that you can easily access just the tunes you want to suit your mood.

So what do you do if you turn on your iPod, all set to listen to your favorite Angry Girl playlist, only to have it respond:

“The drive is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?”

If you’re facing this dilemma right now, click no and back out. If you’ve unfortunately already decided that formatting if your only solution, you may still be able to recover the data on your media player’s hard drive using data recovery software. If that fails, a professional data recovery service like Fields Data Recovery may be able to get to files you can’t retrieve using other methods.

Software Data Recovery

As far as your computer is concerned, your media player is just another storage device. There are many software solutions available to attempt data recovery, and some of them will preserve the data structure so that you’ll have little rebuilding to do once you’ve got your files back. There are also a few programs available online, both free and low-cost, which are specifically designed to recover data from your media player or MP3 player. While the specifics vary from program to program, in general, these instructions apply.

Download the software to your PC or laptop.

Plug your MP3 player into the USB port on your computer.

Start the data recovery program and follow the onscreen prompts to choose the device from which you want to recover the files.

If the files show up in the interface, follow the onscreen instructions to select the files you want to restore and undelete them.

Unfortunately, it’s notoriously difficult to recover files from small hard drives, such as those in MP3 players and media players. If your attempt to recover the data doesn’t work on the first try, don’t try again. Instead, find a data recovery service, such as Fields Data Recovery, that regularly works with small hard drives such as those in your cell phone, camera, media player or music player.