Power went out during importing to library

Question

Hi everyone. I am currently deployed in Iraq, So the power situation isn't exactly the greatest. I have a pretty good number of songs on my external hard drive (in excess of 65000) so the import process takes a really long time. My Itunes library is stored on another external harddrive (ie. hard drive to hard drive transfer). A lot of the songs are WMA format so the transfer takes even longer because of the conversion. So here is my question... I was in the midst of the transfer (using "add folder to library), the already formatted songs had been transferred and I had been waiting three days for all of the converting to finish in the other songs when the power suddenly went out turning both of my hard drives off. So, of course the conversion process stopped leaving me with half a library imported and no way to tell which ones were moved over and which ones were not converted (without going through by hnd that is- not an option with such an extensive library). Is there a way to contiunue the import/conversion from where I left off? And also, is there a way to prevent this from happening in the future? Thanks for all yor help!

Answer 1

I'm not trying to be smart here but have you heard of an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)?
From Wikipedia, "A UPS is inserted between the source of power (typically commercial utility power) and the load it is protecting. When a power failure or abnormality occurs, the UPS will effectively switch from utility power to its own power source almost instantaneously." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uninterruptiblepowersupply
So a UPS will keep your computer going in the event of a power failure, however it can only do that for as long as its batteries last which may not be long enough to complete the iTunes conversion you were in the middle of. At least it would give you the opportunity to gracefully stop the conversion - if that's possible.
With regard to your question about continuing the conversion; I'll leave that to others more knowledgeable about iTunes.
HP Compaq dx6120 P4 2.8 GHz 1GB RAM (BABYJANE)   Windows XP   iPod : 5G 30GB (BLANCHE) 512MB 1stG Shuffle (BARBARELLA) with QT Pro 7.x