GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 640300
"Rescan Music Library" erases your entire library if the source isn't found
Last modified: 2011-01-23 02:25:53 UTC
So I listen to my music off an external hard drive. I purchased some new music earlier in the day but forgot had my external plugged into another machine. I clicked "Tools" > "Rescan Music Library" forgetting this, and Banshee erased my entire library, including ratings and playlist associations! The playlists still existed but contained no songs. Nothing was fixed when I finally plugged in my external and clicked "Rescan Music Library". The songs came in, but with no ratings, or playlist associations. This is absolutely devastating to me because I have 10,000 songs and had about half of them rated and 50 playlists. This should never occur in Banshee under any human interaction circumstances (corrupt database excluded). If the source is missing, Banshee should simply report an error or fail to rescan the library, NOT erase my entire library.
I'm really, really sorry to hear about this. As someone whose approach to play counts and ratings is borderline-obsessive, I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to lose that information for such a large collection of music. It may not help now, but for future reference, you might be able to avoid the significance of a problem like this by choosing to save ratings and playcounts to the files (in Edit > Preferences) and by making occasional backups of ~/.config/banshee-1. But you're completely right that this specific problem is something that Banshee shouldn't allow to happen. It has actually already been reported into our bug tracker as Bug 577225, so I'm marking this report as a duplicate. Thanks for taking the time to report it, and sorry again that it happened. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 577225 ***