How store audio from USB device?
 

I have been adding more "albums" to my USB memory stick and the device has stopped working. I had not gotten to the point of backing this up which I usually do from the start, but now I have to repeat hours of work.

Sooo, what does the (2008) manual (p. 189) mean when it says 20,000 "tracks" can be "stored in the vehicle" that are transfered from the USB device. Was there something I should have done to save these songs or is there any chance there is some auto-save mechanism and they can be found with the i-Drive menu? Oh well, desperate people can dream!

They are not stored in the car- the data exists only on your USB stick. I think the Idrive caches track information so its not reread everytime and thats the 20k you see in the manual...

I think you are right. So I will carefully back up everything, but I have wanted to stay with a USB stick (8 gig) since the Ipod shuffle doesn't work and I have no other need for a standard Ipod.

Its just that I can't keep help thinking that it was the X5 that killed the jump drive. I inserted it with power off, but still wonder.

They're not a particularly reliable data storage medium - you should never use them for anything more than a temporary storage device. You'll get this issue with anything, not just using it with a BMW. I and several other people at my company use them every day for bringing data to/from work and sometimes they just crap out and need to be reformatted.

Its not the first Lexar to drop dead on me, but the circumstances are suspicious this time. Anyway, no way to reformat a device that can't be read by any computer and data recovery cost is not reasonable given the contents.

I use kingston and they have been rock solid...

Well, I have had Kingston, Dell, Lexar and whatever else fail me. I don't know if that is a commentary on my three computers - which are new and have the current os - or the demands I place on these devices since they are used more than once daily.

oh so it's not just the filesystem, it's the device itself? I've only ever lost the filesystem, not the stick itself

Right. I can't read anything on the device, the flashing light does not flash, the device does not show up as a drive on my computer, and so on.

I would like to learn either how you handle these things or what brand(s) you use because this crash cost me a lot of hours. I will also have to wait several days for the warranty replacement jump drive to arrive.

I used the Lexar chat which worked fine but a lot of time is lost with me sending in the defective device and then waiting on them to send a replacement - new or refurbished? - to me.

I think between all of us here at my office, we've probably got at least one of every mainstream brand as well as some cheapy chinese no-names. The way we handle it is basically never trust them as a primary store of data - only use them as a convenient means of temporary transportable storage.

So in your case, never rip your cd's direct to the usb stick or otherwise use your usb stick as the only copy of your mp3's - store the mp3's on your hard disk and just copy them to your usb stick so if/when it dies you can just get another and recopy the same files onto the new one.

In addition to that it's probably also worth getting some additional external storage, like a large usb/e-sata external hard drive or even a NAS to make backups on in case your pc hard disk dies just like your usb stick has. It's less likely to happen, but definitely still happens a lot.

Western digital make a good range of these external disks and are reasonably priced even here in australia where everything is subjected to ridiculous markups/import taxes compared to the US. I've got one of their 'worldbook' NAS drives, it has 2 1tb drives in it which I run in raid1 and use for home backups. The key points there are NAS and raid1 - NAS means 'network attached storage' which in turn means the storage device is available over the home network (so any of the pc's at home can utilise it simultaneously instead of only one at a time like USB) and raid1 means it has two hard drives inside it, and all the contents of one are mirrored onto the second - if one of the disks failed, the backup device continues on the remaining disk. You then get the opportunity to swap out the faulty disk and continue on your merry way without losing any data.

I guess I've gone way beyond the scope of this forum now, but hopefully it's info that helps you :)