by Boobounder » Mon May 01, 2017 10:31 am
My employer manages my hardware upgrades. Each time the contents of my internal hard drive are compressed and saved. I have kept those backups, made about every 3 years for the last 4-5 rounds.
My media is kept on an external hard drive whose folder structure has not changed much in 15 years.
When my PC is upgraded, I often have to reinstall software (like MediaMonkey), and sometimes I neglect to "re-attach" all the user files.
Now I want to recover playlists I made with MediaMonkey a long while back, under versions 3 and 2. In theory, any DB from those versions is still there in those internal hard drive backups. In theory, those playlists still point to the same file locations on my external drive.
What strategy should I follow, and where should I look?
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Here are some thoughts and questions.
I am currently running version 4. Can I direct it to open some file containing playlists from earlier versions? If so, what file(s)?
I am not really interested in merging my old libraries into my current one. How do I make sure that doesn't happen while doing this?
Alternatively, maybe I need to restart an earlier version of MediaMonkey. What are the filenames of the *.exe files that run older versions of MediaMonkey? If I need to start them up, will my installation of version 4 interfere (even if I do not have it open)?
Suppose I do find an old playlist that I want to recover. What is the best way to get it back into version 4? Export to M3U, and then import?
And, obviously, what are the differences between the versions that I need to keep on top of.
FWIW: my regex and coding skills are pretty sharp. If I can get to something, anything, with some semblance of a filename or path, I can probably recover what I need.
My employer manages my hardware upgrades. Each time the contents of my internal hard drive are compressed and saved. I have kept those backups, made about every 3 years for the last 4-5 rounds.
My media is kept on an external hard drive whose folder structure has not changed much in 15 years.
When my PC is upgraded, I often have to reinstall software (like MediaMonkey), and sometimes I neglect to "re-attach" all the user files.
Now I want to recover playlists I made with MediaMonkey a long while back, under versions 3 and 2. In theory, any DB from those versions is still there in those internal hard drive backups. In theory, those playlists still point to the same file locations on my external drive.
What strategy should I follow, and where should I look?
***********************************************************************
Here are some thoughts and questions.
I am currently running version 4. Can I direct it to open some file containing playlists from earlier versions? If so, what file(s)?
I am not really interested in merging my old libraries into my current one. How do I make sure that doesn't happen while doing this?
Alternatively, maybe I need to restart an earlier version of MediaMonkey. What are the filenames of the *.exe files that run older versions of MediaMonkey? If I need to start them up, will my installation of version 4 interfere (even if I do not have it open)?
Suppose I do find an old playlist that I want to recover. What is the best way to get it back into version 4? Export to M3U, and then import?
And, obviously, what are the differences between the versions that I need to keep on top of.
FWIW: my regex and coding skills are pretty sharp. If I can get to something, anything, with some semblance of a filename or path, I can probably recover what I need.