Like many on here I love my music. Over the years I have collected over 700 LP’s and nearly 200 CD’s (and growing). The problem with that is…space. Where to put them all. I have the LP’s in an alcove cupboard, the CD’s in racks in the opposite alcove and on two floor standing carousels.

But, not wishing to be classed as a dinasaur, about five years ago I set about transferring all of my CD’s to digital format burning them onto iTunes, which meant I could also access them to play through my Sonos speakers dotted about the house. I bought a two bay QNAP NAS holding in total 12TB and transferred my iTunes onto that. Some three cd burners and months and months of burning later it was done and for about five years it has worked a treat and now with the likes of Apple Music and Spotify and downloading in general being the way music is going, my other half decided on two things…she wants the lounge re-imagined after 20 years, and she was fed-up with all these CD’s and as we had access to them digitally, the CD’s had to go.

Anything for a peacful life I gave in, but was adamant I would not ‘get rid’ of the CD’s as everyone I have spoken to about it said I should, but store them in the loft.

Just after Christmas, I burned a few newly aquired CD’s as normal. Two days later I went into iTunes to access one of the albums and saw that randome tracks were missing…funny. I then went to access an old album and again randome tracks were missing. I checked my NAS but all the tracks of the said albums were there.

Then I noticed it… The tracks that were on my NAS but not on iTunes had a strange symbol next to them, as opposed to the album cover artwork as normal and instead of M4a or whatever the prefix ‘7z’ then sat at the top of the track listing was a ‘read me’ file which had never been there before. Upon opening it it said this…

!!! ALL YOUR FILES HAVE BEEN ENCRYPTED !!! All your files were encrypted using a private and unique key generated for the computer. This key is stored in our server and the only way to receive your key and decrypt your files is making a ******* payment.

I have spoken to QNAP who said ’you’ve been hacked’…no s**t Sherlock!

Have been trying to restore back using the Qrescue and a thing called photorec to before, but to no avail.

I have protection and I use a VPN and DO NOT go onto dodgy sites..at 63 I can’t be arsed. I spend most of my computer time on here, YouTube or BBC News.

So, I will have to get them all down from the loft and spend months burning all my CD’s yet again.

We work hard for what we have and some scum sucking pond life thinks for doing that we are mugs, and so have the have the right to take it away.

If there is any justce I just hope whichever dirty *** hole did this, has his or her underwear infested with a thousand lice, coupled with a sever case of thrush and a rotting of the flesh on thier fingers, nose and genetalia.

Rant over.