Something funky happened on my Touch a couple days ago. I had had about 5GB of music and videos on there, along with photos, apps and other content. After syncing, I noticed that it now had no music or videos, but 5GB of stuff in the “Other” category of the iTunes capacity meter.

All of the forum postings I read say that you cannot see what exactly is in “Other”. The only suggestion I found was to do a restore.

Based on what I see, I believe that the iPod Touch somehow lost track of my music and videos. The files are obviously still on the device, which explains why so much data is in the “Other” category. But the OS just isn’t treating them as music and videos, which explains why nothing is there when I click the “Music” and “Videos” buttons on the home screen. 

So I did the restore per the instructions on Apple’s web site. It took the good part of an hour and a half. Here’s my capacity meter now:

I still don’t have any of my music or videos, but I sure am glad that I decided when I first got this device to manage my music and videos manually! All of the files are all still sitting neatly in a folder on my computer. So all I need to do is drag them back over into the iTunes app and I’ll be good to go.

I don’t know what made all this happen. I’m not all that happy about it, but at least the restore process seems to have put it all my apps (and their data) back on the device.