Backing Up Your Zune

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My laptop hard drive was running out of space, so I moved all of my music files to an external USB drive.  Shortly after, the external USB crashed.  Now, the Zune was the only place that had all of these songs (and I have a ton of songs that I ripped from CD before a CD case was stolen out of my Jeep many years ago).  Replacing these would mean hundreds of dollars to buy CDs for songs that I already owned. 

The next time I plugged in my Zune, the Zune Software started deleting files from my device!  I stopped the sync before much damage was done.  However, all of the songs were marked in the Zune Software as "pending removal from device".  Each time I tried to sync, the Zune Software started trying to delete the songs again. 

Zune Software lets you select a song on your Zune device and drag it to the Sync list pane, this will allow you to copy songs from your device back to your computer.  However, I couldn't seem to get this to work... each song would start synchronizing, then immediately stop.

To get the songs from your Zune back onto your hard drive, here are some simple steps.

  1. Make sure your Zune is not plugged in and your Zune software isn't running
  2. Open up regedit by going to the start menu and selecting "run". Type regedt32 and hit "OK"
  3. Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\ControlSet001\Enum\USB\
  4. Search for "PortableDeviceNameSpace". This should be contained in the Vid_####&Pid_####\########_-_########_-_########_-_########\Device Parameters within the above ...\USB\ The ##'s listed here will be numbers and letters specific to your Zune
  5. Change the following values:
    1. EnableLegacySupport to 1
    2. PortableDeviceNameSpaceExcludeFromShell to 0
    3. ShowInShell to 1
  6. Plug in your Zune, and make sure the Zune Software starts up.
  7. Hopefully at this point you can open up "My Computer" and browse your device, though it does NOT show up as a drive letter.

[via https://www.zuneuser.com/forums/blog-discussion/333-using-zune-backup-drive.html]

To try to entice the search engine and help others faced with this problem... here's a list of related terms to try to help others in this situation.

  • Zune backup drive
  • Pending removal from device
  • Zune deleted
  • Delete songs Zune