[Todd Madson]

I updated to the latest version of iTunes and it appears that literally thousands of my pieces of music are gone.

If it was all commercially available music it wouldn't be such a bad thing but I'm a composer and also use iTunes to organize my own music, date stamping, cataloging.

Looked in my main drive / users / my user profile / music / itunes /
There's a number of directories all added in the last year.

In the same directory is an itunes music directory that just has a folder "automatically add to itunes" in it - everything else is gone.

And anything older than 2008 is GONE.

I don't even know where I would look for what is missing because it's such a big voluminous bit - I usually write between 200-300 pieces a year.

I've got a 155 gig backup from a year or so ago with some of the missing material but I'm mildly horrified that a simple software update created a vast swath of carnage.

Seriously gonna be sick over this.

Checked the recycle bin and there is nothing there.

[Todd Madson]

Update: my iTunes directory is 20 gigs - the backup (from last December 2009) is 155.94 gigs.

What on earth happened? Crimeny.

[Spheric Harlot]

Oh Jeez, that's terrible.

First off:

WHAT THE **** YOU ARE A COMPOSER AND DON'T KEEP A FULL BACKUP OF YOUR ARCHIVE!? Seriously.
(But I know you don't any extra kicking, so I'll leave it at that - had to get it said, though.)


I've had iTunes lose hundreds (probably thousands) of songs over the years - I keep discovering artists I had entire *discographies* of in my library that have completely disappeared. I can put some of this down to the fact that I kept copying back and forth among ever larger drives as my library grew in size, and might have inadvertently overwritten some stuff there.

Except, I have a friend who has ripped a lot of vinyl from his own collection, and he's had several instances of minor point-updates to iTunes causing albums to disappear that he KNEW he'd added to the library just days before.

Another friend kept losing "Cydonia" by the Orb, bizarrely. She added the album to iTunes from her CD no less than three times, and it kept disappearing again after a while.

In all these cases, stuff wasn't just removed from the library, it was OUTRIGHT DELETED from the drive.

I haven't had it happen in a while now, but I keep backups just in case.

[mduell]

Why don't you keep current backups?

I upgraded to 9.1 with no issues and no music files deleted (they're all backed up anyway).

[Todd Madson]

Generally keeping current backups should be done but I thought I was reasonably up to date.

But there's no excuse: what major software app deletes hundreds of gigs of data for no good reason?

Apple quality control seems to be slipping as they focus on their new ipad baby and let everything else
go to wrack and ruin.

[Spheric Harlot]

I've had this problem for YEARS, as I wrote above.

Long before iPhone, let alone iPad.

If you're "reasonably" up to date, then you have nothing to "reasonably" lament about.

No excuse for this bug, and your complaining is well appropriate, but have you never had a hard drive die on you suddenly and render hundreds of gigs of data unreachable "for no good reason"?

[OreoCookie]

With Time Machine, there is really no excuse to have a current backup. Even with a mobile Mac, unless I'm traveling, Time Machine automates backups.

Even though there is no excuse for bugs to be that destructive, your argument is sort of like driving without a seatbelt, because you drive safely. Shit happens and with a good backup strategy, these things are not really scary.

[Spheric Harlot]

Now that we've all said that ,

Is there anybody else who's had iTunes lose and delete large amounts of music in a point update?

My anecdotal evidence leads me to believe that there is a real problem here, and it would be nice to nail it down to something.

[Todd Madson]

The other weird thing - a while back one of the updates changed all of the album cover art to that of ONE album.

I had thousands of pieces of cover art to re-do, I wasn't sure if there was a directory I could delete to prevent that
but it was so dumb, everything in my collection had the cover art to Steve Hillage's "L" cd.

[turtle777]

iTunes lost my Rick Astley CDs.

I'm grateful.

-t

[Art Vandelay]

I've never had any data loss in iTunes.

[imitchellg5]

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot 

Is there anybody else who's had iTunes lose and delete large amounts of music in a point update?

My anecdotal evidence leads me to believe that there is a real problem here, and it would be nice to nail it down to something.

I've lost my entire iTunes library after a QuickTime update a few years ago. It was incredibly strange. Luckily that was back in the day when my iPod held my whole library and it was quite simple to copy back.

[Spheric Harlot]

Are you sure it was a QT update? There was the infamous iTunes update bug that wiped any attached external drive that hat a space in the volume name.

[slugslugslug]

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot 

Now that we've all said that ,

Is there anybody else who's had iTunes lose and delete large amounts of music in a point update?

Never had iTunes lose anything, to my knowledge.

My anecdotal evidence leads me to believe that there is a real problem here, and it would be nice to nail it down to something.

A few more anecdotes and you’ll have some data! Oh wait…

[imitchellg5]

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot 

Are you sure it was a QT update? There was the infamous iTunes update bug that wiped any attached external drive that hat a space in the volume name.

Yep. It was QuickTime 7, when it first came out.

[Wiskedjak]

I can understand the iTunes library file getting corrupted, but that is the *only* file on the computer that iTunes should be doing anything to but reading. How iTunes gets off deleting files without user direction is beyond me.

[seanc]

I'm missing a few songs here or there, but I've been blaming me, not iTunes.

[Doofy]

Some rulez for you kiddies:

1) Never trust software.
2) Never trust software.
3) Never trust the people who wrote the software.
4) Never trust the company who sold you the software.
5) Don't be an early adopter of anything if you quite like your files.

Oh, and you're backing up everything every day to two locations using two different backup apps (so, four backups in total), right?

[Todd Madson]

I learned that lesson for sure.

But the weirdest thing is, it looks like whatever the problem was it migrated to my first backup but not my second (mostly).

I think it's under control now but...man. Horrid.

[-Q-]

Nothing like a close call like that to remind one how important backups are. Glad to hear the loss was mitigated.