I lost all my itunes album artwork....again. How to keep your artwork permanently

[Ham Sandwich]

I got fascinated and somewhat addicted to quality album art for my ripped CDs when I switched to doing computer as source rather than CD.  I ripped all my CDs, put the CDs away in storage and missed having the shelves of CDs and ready available physical artwork.  I remember albums more by cover art than by title or artist.  If I scroll though my albums by artist I forget what is what.  If I scroll through by album name I'm completely lost.  If I scroll through by album art I'm in my element and know what everything is.  I like to see my music collection visually with album art.
 
So the good album art helps me like my digital music collection better and feel more attached to that music rather than just treating it as a bunch of bits.

 

[grokit]

You must love Cover Flow, Ham! I will probably start upgrading the worst of mine randomly once my library has all the images correctly, it's just not quite there yet.
 
But I don't think I will ever get to your level

 

[Ham Sandwich]

 
Quote:

Windows Vista has a Backup and Restore Center with a System Restore feature at Control Pane>System and Maintenance, I've never used it but just went there and compressed the backup partition that I believe it created. It runs on a partition of the main drive by default, so unless that is something you can change it would not be good for an HDD failure but should evidently work for a system restore.

Windows Vista and Window 7 have a neat backup system.  But unfortunately only in the Ultimate, Business, and Enterprise versions.  The other versions get short shifted on the backup features.
 
The Ultimate (and business and enterprise) version has a Shadow Copy feature that takes snapshots of your files at scheduled times and lets you go back in time to previous versions.  So if you want to go back in time and look at a document the way it was a week ago you can.  Right-click, properties, previous versions.  Very cool.
 
The Ultimate (and business and enterprise) version also has a full image backup.  You can backup an entire partition to an image file (in VHD format as used by Microsoft's Virtual PC).  That image file can be saved to a different physical hard drive.  If you image your system drive you can recover (restore) that image by booting from the Windows install DVD.  The files in the image backup are also used as restore points for the Shadow Copy feature.
 
So Microsoft has the goods for neat backup options.  They just don't make those goods available to the general public unless you overspend (buy the Ultimate version) of the OS.  Maybe if people pester Microsoft enough and say "Hey, Apple has Time Machine, where's ours?" then Microsoft will say "We've had it all along.  Here it is in Home Premium.".
 
There's free software though that will do full image backups.  So all's not lost.  But those third party options aren't as cooly integrated as Microsoft's options.

 

[Ham Sandwich]

 
Quote:

You must love Cover Flow, Ham! I will probably start upgrading the worst of mine randomly once my library has all the images correctly, it's just not quite there yet.
 
But I don't think I will ever get to your level

Cover Flow?  That's an iTunes thing?
Yeah, I love the cover flow on my iPod Classic. 
 
I use J River Media Center which has some neat ways of scrolling through artwork and viewing albums as cover art images.  And J River Media Center is very good about not altering the images I use and embed.  It also has ways of saving all of the artwork in a single directory so it can easily be copied and backed up.  It doesn't do things like hide the artwork in undocumented ITC2 files or do other underhanded things to the artwork.