You are trying to boost your pc performance in some less conventional way and then, suddenly, there is only gray smoke what have left from your 1 TB heard drive and your enormous movie collection? Your ‘puppy’ buried your brand new tiny netbook in the garden and you will never find out where? Lost your music and last holidays’ photos? You’re crashed but you recall you had copied it to your Apple TV some time before. Yes, coping files to the Apple TV is making a backup without knowing it. The only question now is how to get it back. Here is what you have to do to recover your priceless media files from your atv.

1. Enable SSH on your Apple TV

here is how to do it: Enable SSH & AFP on your Apple TV

2. Execute the following command:

$> scp -1 -r frontrow@<APPLETV_IP>:/mnt/Media/<media_to_recover>/ /<Destination_local_machine>

example:

$> scp -1 -r frontrow@192.168.27.150:/mnt/Media/Photos/ /tmp/

In this case all the photos stored in Apple TV will be copied to the local directory /tmp/

That’s all. Yes, it’s that simple.

In case you want to recover all the data without specifying any subdirectory use the following command:

$> scp -1 -r frontrow@192.168.27.150:/mnt/Media/ /myAppleTVfullbackup/

NOTE:

It will work on Mac, Linux as well as on Windows with openSSH

To enable SSH you have to have your Apple TV already hacked

The structure of directories and file names on Apple TV is the same like the one used in iPods

Enjoy and good luck!