iTunes 7 might delete your Files! Silently!
Please be careful – iTunes 7.0 might delete files and folders in your music folder, even if you have switched off automatic management! This turns out to be really nasty if you have set the music folder to something like E: or C: !! As I did on my PC. Au revoir, my precious downloads … 
Want to see a demo? I have recorded a Youtube.com video of iTunes in Action (deleting files).
The previous week was quite exciting. It started with great news from the Apple keynote, like the new iPod nano (which I had just bought the same night). The new Nano requires iTunes 7, so I bit the bullet and updated my PC from iTunes 6 to version 7.0. Everything went fine. At least it seemed so…
It was during the weekend when I realized that a lot of my downloaded files oddly had vanished from my drive E. At first I thought, ok, maybe I accidentally deleted them by my own. Fine, no problem, so I downloaded the files again. Waited until download was over. Double-Checked by opening the files. Everything was fine. Guess what, the next day all of them were gone again.
As it turned out, the culprit was iTunes 7. This f*g version has a nasty bug (among lots of other issues!). By using FileMon from SysInternals to log all file operations on drive E:, I found that iTunes, just after startup, scans the folder which is set as “Music Folder” in the preferences. That’s ok so far. But here’s what not: The setting for automatic management was switched off, yet iTunes 7 didn’t care. It ignores this setting and does some strange kind of sync, which might result in files and folders getting deleted.
Back in the times of iTunes 5, I had the music folder set to “E:”. I switched off the automatic management, so the music folder (drive E 
was simply ignored. iTunes 6 behaved as expected and I just forgot about these settings. Along comes iTunes 7 which has changed this behavior. iTunes 7 always syncs the music folder (E: for me) in a very strange way: all new files and subfolders that were or will be added to this folder after the iTunes 7 installation just get deleted when iTunes starts. It’s kind of scary.
I have filed a bug report to Apple. But this behavior is so nasty and data loss might be huge. So I decided to report in my blog as well. God (Apple) help us all!
Daniel said,
September 19, 2006 @ 11:25 am
Why not just use iTunes 7 on your Mac? Most bugs are only present on the Windows XP version.
Kevin Tracy said,
September 26, 2006 @ 5:52 am
HOLY CRAP! The same thing just happened to me! Tell me what you did (if anything) to get your music back.
I noticed that the files appear to be gone, but I haven’t gotten the space back on my hard drive.
maba said,
September 26, 2006 @ 9:08 am
Kevin, I could restore only some files by using a tool named R-Studio, which is commercial, but I think there also exists some freeware tools for “undeleting”. For me, the files and folders were removed, i.e. space was released and the sectors would end up eventually getting overwritten by new allocations.
Mikkel said,
September 27, 2006 @ 6:32 pm
Daniel: It does the same thing for me on my Mac. I’ve copied the files back from my backup drive 4-5 times now! I hope it’s a bug that gets fixed fast, as otherwise iTunes is completely useless to me.
Nehemiah said,
November 28, 2006 @ 8:10 pm
I just got my 2000t and all of my songs are skipping in iTunes, and I cant figure out why. If someone could help me out and tell me how to fix this I would really appreciate it because its driving me crazy. Thanks for the replys.
Mike said,
December 1, 2006 @ 11:03 am
Happened to me about 3 hours ago lost almost all my TV Shows, my Music, Pictures, and Movies from my Powerbook on OS X 10.4.8 and the latest iTunes version.
Sent an email to Apple no response so far
Stu said,
December 23, 2006 @ 4:49 pm
After the third time I had to use an undelete client to restore my files I started to get suspicions that itunes had something to do with it.
This is getting increasingly frustrating, but thank you for the article and the confirmation of what I suspected.
geno said,
January 14, 2007 @ 8:25 am
this fucking itunes7.0 did it to me as well. i lost about 30 gigs of music. you can get it back by using undelete about $30 or winundelete $50. i pissed!!! i noticed that all files have been renamed. are they going to be renamed back after i restore them?
nigel said,
January 16, 2007 @ 3:30 am
please keep this thread going! ive lost a few gigs of stuff because of this i-tunes bug. are there any freeware devices i can use to restore them? (recomendations) i a little afaid that using a defrag tool may just wipe the files as they are possibly corrupted. i have the files on an external drive does that make a difference?
Paps said,
January 19, 2007 @ 7:57 pm
Same here! Just lost 50 gigs of tunes! F**K Itunues, hated it anyway.. Will probably not buy an ipod next time!
Pablo said,
January 29, 2007 @ 7:41 am
Same here, with a twist. iTunes doesn’t actually delete the file, it leaves the file where it should be, but the file now weighs in at Zero kb. It took all my iTMS downloads and a slew of additional music, in all, about 30GB.
P*ssed is an understatement.
Brian said,
February 11, 2007 @ 3:15 am
Same thing happened to me. I installed iTunes 7 for the first time today and lost 6 gigs of mp3s on my second hard drive, but it didn’t delete any of the mp3s or .wav music files on my primary hard drive. Does anyone have a solution to this?
Adriano said,
February 17, 2007 @ 12:44 am
It has just happened to me… I downloaded Undelete Plus (free) right away from http://www.download.com and successfully recovered all files… From now on I am pointing iTunes to monitor an empty folder and managing everything manually.
Nathan said,
February 17, 2007 @ 1:04 am
Same here as Pablo - any fixes yet? LOST RARE S***! Running OSX…
asia said,
February 18, 2007 @ 9:24 pm
what if you accidentally delete itunes when you try to download the new version, and you cant get to the music you once had, and every time i try to download the new itunes it doesn’t wrok it always stops at 99% and my computer freezes.
Jenny said,
February 20, 2007 @ 5:18 pm
It would have been really nice to find this a few days ago. I just lost everything. Over 5,000 songs. I had all of them saved to E:
Miles VdE said,
March 19, 2007 @ 11:48 am
Just Discovered this behaviour yesterday, Hopefully just after my backup !!!
Using OSX and Itunes 7.02
I’ll install the latest version 7.1x and hope it has been fixed !
I am a Apple Fan since Apple II, but this is really SHEAT Steve !!!
Annoyed said,
June 7, 2007 @ 6:10 am
It happened to me, I wouldn’t be so annoyed if I didn’t lose a few albums I ripped from a scratched cd’s bought in Europe years ago. There is little chance of getting it back now.
*hitting head against brick wall*
Jason said,
July 8, 2007 @ 12:04 am
This might be a little low tech, but I figured I’d wait until they fix it and then upload all the songs from my ipod. I was lucky enough not to have connected them before I noticed the problem
Florence said,
August 15, 2007 @ 1:43 am
Has the problem been solved in iTunes 7.3.2? I think this is just happening to my computer. My library was saved on a second hard drive G. Please let me know!
Thanks. F
Dee said,
September 25, 2007 @ 7:48 pm
yep same thing has happened to me just bought the new video ipod and tada thought it was great only had it a week, and somehow my received files, my music files, and my picture files have deleted and empty! tried restore prgrammes no joy! think i’m just gonna give my ipod back, really want my photo’s back! this is on windows xp if any of you guys know please let me know
Andria said,
September 26, 2007 @ 4:13 pm
I lost over 600 songs..i know that is not alot, but one day just opened iTunes and EVERYTHING was gone..completely empty. Is it a sure thing to buy undelete software? will this get my library back to how it was before?
wayne said,
October 4, 2007 @ 12:24 pm
Hey, i am not alone, great . each time i have downloaded new ichunes software i lose randomnly selected albums from my music folder. its freaking annoying to me as i know its not my stupidity that causes this, any suggestions?
Jenny said,
October 8, 2007 @ 2:47 am
fj;aklfja;!!! This just happened to me and I’m pissed. Granted I should have backed up my music but it deleted a ton of stuff from my ipod.
caitlin said,
November 30, 2007 @ 6:13 am
just happened to me last night… 5000 songs magically disappeared, but my hard drive still shows that the space is being used by 22 gb of music plus the other stuff i had. i’m massively heartbroken and really shocked that apple, in all its self-promotion and commercials trying to prove it’s better than PCs, has not fixed this problem by itunes version 7.5. steve jobs owes me $4950.
sam said,
December 9, 2007 @ 1:23 am
this still hasn’t been fixed? it’s been an effing year already.
mattywix said,
December 19, 2007 @ 12:15 pm
does anyone have a solution to this? Same happens if itunes is closed and I use the windows file explorer and click on a file to listen to it - itunes takes the file and removes it …file vanishes from disk (I searched!).
memetech said,
December 25, 2007 @ 8:36 pm
Boom. Christmas day. All gone. MF
magnj said,
December 26, 2007 @ 7:32 am
I lost 12 CD’s I ripped to FLAC on my H:/ drive, which I at one point, pointed iTunes towards to see if it would play FLAC. But ALSO A whole shitload of pictures which I was playing in a sideshow earlier.
Unfortunately I tried to use windows restore and undelete is not working
Steele said,
December 29, 2007 @ 1:53 am
just happened to me,SOO PISSEDI collected these songs for the new ipod classic i was going to buy!downloading undelete now*fingers crossed*
peter said,
January 1, 2008 @ 1:03 am
Does anyone have a solution to this yet? This fucking piece of shit deleted a bunch of files including all my pictures.
Nick said,
January 8, 2008 @ 8:13 am
Oh sh*t! I thought my 8 year old deleted a few songs. But I just checked today and noticed about 8000 songs gone. Do you know how long it takes to rip 8000 songs from my CDs into iTunes? About 4 months of late nights and weekends and lots of patience. This isn’t counting $500 worth of purchased songs.
I am so pissed! Apple better have a fix for this pronto.
Yama said,
January 9, 2008 @ 8:45 pm
I’ve always hated iTunes…which is why i never got it. Winamp is now compatible with iPods, I hear…
Withnail said,
January 11, 2008 @ 12:44 pm
Same thing happened to us - over 1,000 songs gone, including 104 purchased from iTunes store. No explanation - files missing from hard drive. How can this software do this? It’s illegal. If Sony sold TVs which got up in the middle of the night and threw all your DVDs out the window they’d be bust by now.
Colin McGookin said,
January 18, 2008 @ 3:09 pm
Just updated to iTunes7 on prompt of software update and on opening it find it has lost my entire music collection including hundreds of £ of downloads, this is outrageous, especially since looking at above comments Apple must have known for weeks that this was happening.
Stu Platt said,
January 20, 2008 @ 11:25 pm
And me, gutted, had a load of playlists set up that took ages.
Still got my files but gotta start all over again.
They really need to fix this - quick !
Marcus Howell said,
January 23, 2008 @ 5:17 pm
iTunes 7.6.0.2.9? Still has the same f*ing problem. For me it’s a majority (but still a random assortment) of recently-ripped mp3s. And it’s every time I restart the computer.
Winamp? Sounding better and better to me right now.
iTunes Silently Deleting Songs - graysky said,
January 28, 2008 @ 5:59 am
[...] listed, but with an “!” next to it, and the actual file is gone. Others on the web have witnessed similar problems with iTunes 7, often times with far worse consequences. My set up is not exotic; all the the files [...]
Rhys said,
February 2, 2008 @ 4:34 am
FAGGIT ITUNES DELETED SOME SONGS…
I HAD 1000 SONGS AND THE NEXT SECOND I HAD 965?
BUT ITS TOO FUCKIGN HARD TO FIND WHICH ONES EVEN DELETED -.-’
JESUS CHRIST WHAT THE FUCKKKK!!!
SO MAD.
Enwezor said,
February 5, 2008 @ 9:04 pm
This has been happening to me for ages. Songs just seems to disappear all the time. Luckily, I’ve still got all my CDs and I’m planning to build a Home Media PC upon which I will NOT use iTunes. I hate that piece of s*** software!!!!!
liklibo said,
February 6, 2008 @ 9:04 am
Does it do that to iTunes 7.3 too? And when it deletes your file, does it still play the song in iTunes? Because I’m not sure if this is the problem with me. I am also battling a spyware issue at the moment and Windows recently “deleted some corrupted files” from my hard drive. So when I logged onto my computer I looked through my music folder, and all my files R-Z are GONE, wtf! Odd thing is, iTunes is still playing the song even though it’s supposedly gone from my disk. (I tried the search feature, and I also looked at the file info on iTunes, and it showed me which folder the file should be in, but it’s not in there.)
So do you think it was iTunes that deleted my files?
liklibo said,
February 6, 2008 @ 9:08 am
(cont.)
So I don’t even know whether or not it was iTunes that “deleted” my files.. god this is so trippy.. it sucks to have spyware/adware at the same time.
Luckily I backed up my music files..
How To Back Up Your Personal Computer « LifeSpy with a G9 said,
February 16, 2008 @ 1:28 pm
[...] install that deletes data files. (Apple once accidentally released a version of iTunes that could delete all files on a hard [...]
mike said,
February 28, 2008 @ 6:32 am
just updated to the latest version of iTunes after I was prompted to do so upon opening the shit ass software, so of course I did - who doesn’t want bug fixes and the latest and greatest version, right?
wrong. same story as the other poor bastards who lost their music they spent months importing from CDs - i figure at 30 hours a week for 2 months @ a modest $20/hr., those iTunes fuckers owe me $4800. i lost 55 GB of music just by updating to the new version - does anyone test this shit or do they just roll it out and see what happens? WTF??!!?? such bullshit. spent 1-1/2 hrs. on the phone with some dumbass call center person and my music library is still fucked. tried a system restore several times, still fucked. how do they get away with this shit? someone owes us an apology, reimbursement for our lost time, and a swift kick in the ass.
Karlie said,
March 1, 2008 @ 5:52 am
All my songs were deleted off of my i-pod nano when i was charging it. I have no idaea how that happened. Firts my pictures were delted now my songs. Does anyone no how to fix that?
Karlie said,
March 1, 2008 @ 5:59 am
O.K. If you had the same trouble that i just had…this is what you should do to get them back on your i-pod nano. first you right click on you i-pod (ex: Karlies I-pod) second you find I-pod options. Then your i-pod has all of its songs back on it!! i finally have my songs back!! hope it works for you!!
John Joseph Adams said,
March 2, 2008 @ 7:07 am
If you happened to open itunes and discover your music was gone before you synced your ipod (as I luckily did), try downloading iGadget. That’ll let you download your music off your ipod and back onto your computer. I’m just doing that now, and it seems to be working fine.
Hot Black Magazine » How To Back Up Your Personal Computer said,
March 3, 2008 @ 12:52 am
[...] install that deletes data files. (Apple once accidentally released a version of iTunes that could delete all files on a hard [...]
Peter Watcyn-Jones said,
March 5, 2008 @ 3:15 pm
Same thing happened to me last night. Suddenly 5 folders disappeared form my hard disk. Is it only windows that has this problem? Any other software you canuse with the iPod?
Joe Wilson said,
March 12, 2008 @ 4:24 pm
Gaaah! This just happened to me also, last about 18gigs of music. At least 9 of those gigs I won’t be able to get back as a bunch of the CD’s were stolen a few years back >_<
Still no fix I take it? System Restore didn’t do jack (was a wildshot anyway)
Becky said,
March 16, 2008 @ 12:32 pm
Oh my gosh, why hasn’t apple fixed this! I’ve just bought all these new songs and didn’t back them up and now they are all gone. I’m so annoyed. Surely this issue should be made known to the people of the world. It waists peoples money and apple doesn’t even care! Its so selfish! well, I’m certainly never using this version of itunes again!
HeatherH said,
March 18, 2008 @ 6:48 pm
Wow, I’m glad to see that I’m not alone - I lost more than 1,000 songs when I accepted an iTunes update yesterday. The song titles still display in iTunes, but with the “!” next to them, and the files themselves are gone. Add to this the fact that none of my remaining library will load onto my brand-new 80GB Classic (even though it’s recognized by iTunes and seems to be syncing), and I’m seriously considering jettisoning the whole Apple line. My sanity’s not worth it!
Jennifer said,
March 20, 2008 @ 4:57 pm
This is a bitch. 16 GB lost thanks to iTunes. Many of which I no longer have the CDs to. I’ve, along with others, have lost 100’s of dollars worth of music thanks to this “Bug” that apparently Apple failed to mention in their “Is this okay to download” statement before we all downloaded it. Who do I bitch to about this? You’d think Apple would have already fixed this by now.
Joey said,
March 22, 2008 @ 1:44 pm
This isn’t a bug this is a feature. Only seems to be happening to AAC files and not to mp3 files. All the stuff I lost was AAC files that I got from newsgroups, anything I got from ripping my own CD’s was OK.
Kathy said,
March 27, 2008 @ 1:33 am
I am just coming into this fray after discovering that nearly all of my itunes stuff is gone, I think it was because I just “upgraded” to the latest version in response to the automatic message. I am not a techie, but I had probably 50 or 60 CDs worth of music and hundreds of Audible books there. What do I do? Thanks anyone who can tell me.
Tom said,
March 28, 2008 @ 4:26 am
And what about non-music files? I had a very important TextEdit file on my newish iMac that has completely disappeared since I upgraded to iGoons, er, iTunes 7.6. I have always liked the program, mostly, and hadn’t noticed any of these devastating shenanigans until today…Now I’ve lost almost every single music file AND, for some odd reason, this text file that had p/ws on it. I thought maybe it happened when I was in 2nd Life and the Mac ’softly and suddenly vanished away,’ ie., turned off instantly as if the power had been pulled. But now I read about iTunes 7, and I’m upset and confused!
So, what is it now…nothing? Just nothing? No explanation from Apple or way to fix or…anything? I’ll try the workaround s/w mentioned above (if it’s Apple, not PC), but I hold little hope….
JD said,
March 28, 2008 @ 8:21 am
It seems I’m the latest one to join this sad club of people who have lost their music on iTunes. Just like some of you have mentioned, it appears I can still play some of the songs but then some of other songs which I had on there are totally gone! I had over 11,000 songs on iTunes and it now shows I only have 2800!! We should start some kind of petition, get it signed by all who are experiencing this problem and make this public NOW! What a ripp off! I was lucky enough to notice the problem before connecting my iPod and I also have most of my music physically stored on cases, but I’m still pissed at Apple!
Robert said,
April 4, 2008 @ 8:39 pm
Welcome me to the club! I just installed the latest iTunes on my 64-bit Windows boot (on a dual-boot) and pointed it to my iTunes library on F: drive. Woosh! A whole bunch of songs, mainly mp3 rips off of my hundreds of CDs, gone. Any way to count/see which songs are no longer available?
I’ll need to copy these back off my 80GB iPOD. yay - great being anal.
And then I’m going to copy my 5000+ songs somewhere as backup to avoid this in the future.
A class action suit or large petition sounds like a couple of good ideas. This type of idiocy costs people time AND money. Like any of us has much of either. Steve, you fucking imbicile, stop doing this shit! (that was my rant - I’d like to get him in a corner to brow beat him into submission).
B.Lo said,
April 6, 2008 @ 1:14 am
I just lost 20GB of music
I have never been happier!
I am about to throw my brand new macbook Pro out of the window!
FUCK ITUNES, FUCK FUCK FUCK!
brandon said,
April 12, 2008 @ 1:47 am
Can you run a earlier version of itunes without this happening? I just had to restore my comp to get my music back, but I still need something to manage my ipod shuffle, and I dont have itunes at all.
Jay said,
April 16, 2008 @ 6:01 am
WHAT THE FUCK… I JUST LOST 40 GIG OF MUSIC… HOLY FUCK!!
I downloaded Itunes 7 and then connected my ipod. It said it couldn’t read shit from the ipod and asked me to use the restore feature…
MOFOS… WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK..
MAD AS HELL..
Trustworthy said,
April 24, 2008 @ 9:14 pm
*Sighs Heavily*
Same for me. Same for me. But it didn’t do it silently…no. It was BOLD about it.
I’m clicking on songs to play them and the next thing I know about 20 songs just delete right before my eyes. Then it starts going bezerk! Huge chunks of music-gone, gone, gone.
It took all of my songs. All of them. I tried restoring the computer. No such luck. The stupid thing gave me back the folders with nothing in them.
Who’s pissed? I’m pissed. Any solutions yet?
Matt said,
May 4, 2008 @ 11:39 pm
Over 4,000 of my 6,200 songs, GONE. Happy birthday to me.
Fuck you Apple.
Matt said,
May 5, 2008 @ 12:20 am
I bought about 10 new CDs, ripped them with Itunes (installed on a new Vista laptop), and went to resynch my Ipod (for the first time since I had installed Itunes on this laptop). It says it has to wipe my Ipod and resynch to this new library. Ugh, but ok.
Only 1800 songs synched. Out of my 6190. Look at the drive where my music library resides and most of it is GONE.
Thought I had lost approximately 4300 of my 6190 song library AND random other files on my external drive, accessed over a network. Random crap; personal programming projects, all kinds of downloads, installs, patches, in completely different directories. I noticed that the drive was still showing the space as being used, so I rebooted the computer the drive was physically attached to, and voila, everything’s back.
Itunes is OFF my computer now; I hear Winamp’s got Ipod support now? Yay for winamp!
Amanda said,
May 13, 2008 @ 2:55 am
Yep…same thing happened to me. fucking retards.
Rockstar said,
May 21, 2008 @ 6:27 am
Something LIKE this has happened to me.. One day I came on to the computer, and there was NOTHING in my iTunes. Nada. Zilch. Everything was still on my iPod, and some of it still in files, from before I even had iTunes. But EVERYTHING was gone from iTunes. If anyone figures out how to fix this…
Jay said,
May 27, 2008 @ 4:35 pm
I had posted earlier befored on April 16, 2008 @ 6:01 am (Read above). Well, guess what, it did the SAME thing to me yesterday. I lost my 40 gigs again… bottom line, i-tunes 7.0 sucks royally!
I am reverting back to itunes 6.5 today. Read this for the steps to do this. It looks like this downgrading solves all problems that came with upgrading to a f***ed up version of 7.0.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=642274&tstart=0
Hope this helps. I am not upgrading my itunes until they come with a newer version.. a$$holes!
Jay
Tom said,
June 3, 2008 @ 12:56 am
Just bought a new Ipod to replace one I left on the plane and some plane cleaner now has. I needed to upgrade to Itunes 7.6 according to Apple. I not only have lost my music…. Everything else is gone! I think it is still on my computer and am working with it now to try to rebuild. I think apple leaves this stuff in to screwwwwww Windows users who don’t have Macs. Not to mention Windows Vista Premium s?><#$$%^&EoUOU%$!)(!!!!!!
cj said,
June 3, 2008 @ 5:30 pm
hey guys, same thing happening to me. just noticed it last weekend when about 7 albums i had just added to my itunes library were removed. i added them all back and thought that it was just a temp bug, yesterday my itunes library stood at 4200 songs and i got on this morning and its at 4194 songs. iTunes is randomly deleting my music and i have no idea of how to stop it… i’m using windows XP, but im gonna revert back to 6.5 today. screw iTunes and their monopoly!
JJ said,
June 6, 2008 @ 4:14 pm
So I’ve been having this problem for quite some time now as well. Odd part is, for me anyway, it seems to only effect non-iTunes Store songs. Anything I’ve actually purchased from iTunes seems safe. All my songs from cds that I’ve imported or other MP3s that I’ve imported from cds prior to iTunes, seem to be the target of this magical delete routine inside of iTunes. Oh and I’ve ran into this in Windows, MAC, with my library on the same drive, with it on a different drive, and pretty much in a bunch of possible configurations.
It just has me wondering, is this more something that Apple did on purpose than an actual bug? That would tend to explain why it’s gone almost 2 years without being fixed. I mean, if you think about it, I could see it being a way to drive more traffic to the iTunes Store. You have an MP3 that you didn’t buy from iTunes, it ‘magically’ gets deleted, then Apple’s possible thought process is, oh you’ll just click on the convenient icon for the Store, buy it and re-download it.
I’m sure this all sounds very ‘conspiracy theory’ like, but it also has a possible ring of truth to it too, depending on your point of view. So my question is, who’s actually had this happen to *purchased* music?
Carrie said,
June 10, 2008 @ 9:28 am
It’s ridiculous, it’s par for the course, and it doesn’t surprise me in the least.
What I have noticed, though, is that the songs that are being deleted are the songs I’ve had on my old computer and have transferred over. Songs purchased from Itunes are still there, as are the songs I’ve ripped from CDs.
I guess the moral of the story is to make FREQUENT backups.
Andy said,
June 19, 2008 @ 10:49 pm
Yep itunes and apple sure do suck!
It just removed all of my itunes purchases over the last 2 years - so just out of spite i went thru every purchase on my itunes account and reported a problem saying that they deleted them. I know it won’t bring my files back, get a resolution or reduce their profits but they can waste their time reading them as I have wasted mine trying to find the files. They aren’t getting any more of my money that’s for sure.
Jason said,
June 21, 2008 @ 12:30 pm
Same problem here guys, I’m sort of comforted it’s not just me. I thought it had something to do with the Windows reinstall I did a couple of weeks ago, but thinking back it was before then. Suddenly many of the tracks in my itunes library had “!” next to them. I now find I seem to have lost 4K of the 8K tracks I had (which were always saved to external hard drive anyway)
What is most irritating is that it has done it totally randomly - all the old album folders are still there, but with either nothing in or M3U files which are useless! Also lost all the random ungrouped tracks that were just generally in My Music folder. WHat I don’t get is that when you right click on Properties, it’s still saying there are 8K files there?!?! THey MUST be there somewhere??!
Andy said,
June 21, 2008 @ 11:28 pm
UPDATE
Full respect to itunes and in particularly Beverly of itunes store customer support. I received an email from her saying that as a ‘once only’ action she would re instate my purchases so that I could download them again. She did that on Saturday morning and it took me most of the day to do so.
Then I realised that I missed a number of my order numbers off so I wrote back and told her so - and fair play she reinstated the rest of them, I have just finished resintating 166 of my previous purchases. Some were not available and I think I’ve lost them forever but heck full marks for trying to get me back to my pre itunes removal state.
I will now use itunes again - but only with a FULL back up each and every time I download.
So if you’ve lost purchases - my advice is use the itunes reporting to tell them so and you never knwo as a one off you might just get a second chance! Good luck all