Apple killed my Music

Apple decided to secretly stop backing up my Music, without warning. By the time I noticed, the old machine was wiped.

One of the most assholish things Apple has ever done (and they've done a few), was a few versions ago, when I did an upgrade from one Mac to another their "backup" to New Machine decided that they would secretly NOT copy any Music if that Music was ripped from CD. No notifications, backup complete, and so on. By the time I figured it out, the old machine had been wiped.

ℹ️ Info

~ Aristotle Sabouni
Created: 2022-10-28

Backups that don't. I'd been using Apple's upgrade/copy-over service for like a decade. (Before that I used to clone machines manually). It worked well, and by the nth time, I was confident and didn't over-sweat validating, and I had other cloud backups, etc. So as usual, after some cursory tests, I wiped the original Mac and got on with my work.

Change of policy.

Unbeknownst to me, Apple decided that any Music ripped from CD (that you owned but copied yourself to Music) would no longer be copied, and no warning was given. Their feeling was if you owned it, you could re-rip it. Since I'm usually listening on iPhone, by the time I figured out it wasn't on my computer, poof, the old Machine's data was wiped, the machine recycled, and it was gone.

Most of the time, I'm listening to Music on my iPhone -- so I didn't notice it was gone. Months later, I go to listen to Music on my Computer, not my phone, and it's all gone. (There are placeholders, but none of it will play). It was still on the phone -- but they have no way to copy Music BACK from the Phone to the computer.

Change of policy.

Unbeknownst to me, Apple decided that any Music ripped from CD (that you owned but copied yourself to Music) would no longer be copied, and no warning was given. Their feeling was if you owned it, you could just re-rip it. (Yeah, 400 CDs that took me months the first time?). Since I'm usually listening on iPhone, by the time I figured out it wasn't on my computer, poof, the old Machine's data was wiped, the machine recycled, and it was gone.

Deciding to secretly not copy Music and not tell anyone is complete dick move. If they're not going to do it, they needed a warning system. And proof that it was inadequate is that the Apple Store folks were like, "Yeah, we get that a lot".

When I talked to Apple, they were like, "Yeah, we get that a lot, but it was for copyright purposes".

Bullshit. They left the music on the phone, so that was definitely not why. They were pushing their Music service, and wanted you to pay for sync. And if you paid, they'd look at all the ripped music you had, upgrade it to their proprietary format, and let you listen to that. They just purged the originals so you couldn't stop paying. Fuck you!

They fucking deleted my data to try to extort me to pay for it. And their solution was just re-rip 400 CD's, if I really owned it.

Backup Discipline.

I'm pretty good with data. I had lots and lots of backups, in multiple places. But I also know about incrementals -- backing up what changes, and not worrying as much about lower frequency stuff. Turns out for 20 years, I've been mostly skipping Music and other media, because (a) they were supposed to be backed up by media services (b) incrementals backed up what changes, and I haven't changed most of my music. So I couldn't easily get my music back, despite going back 20 years into backups.

One of my sets was iCloud backups -- that mirrored my data.... but didn't copy Music, because if you paid for their service, that had copies you could get. (Except for ripped MP3's). I went to the Second Cloud Backups I have, but that was organized by Personal Project, and Work Projects -- but I didn't bother with large media library that was backed up elsewhere. I went to the SSD Backups I have (2010's), but I'd done incremental backups of stuff that had changed. I hadn't changed Music since the early 2000's. So other than a few songs here and there, the Library core was still missing. I found the iTunes shell -- meaning playlists and metadata, just not most of the media. I did find my wife's subset of media that we had in common, that was about 20% of the collection. I went back to HD backups from 2006 but same thing, I'd skipped Media in most of those copies, or overwritten the entire snapshots after I hadn't used them in a decade, and had it all in the cloud. I have a some DVD backups somewhere as well, but they're so far in the attic, that I wasn't going to fight the spiders for it yet. So I do have it somewhere. Just too much a project to find it, unless we're moving again. We've moved a few times, and in that, Melissa kept getting me to throw old hardware out. Drives or Machines that I haven't needed for a decade, often didn't make the cut.

Software to the rescue? I was trying Mac/iOS software that I could use to inspect my iPhone... but work has my phone locked down to use their network (VPN and MDM stuff). It wouldn't give me the lowest level access to the iPhone I needed to extract the data to the Mac.

Finally I found Touch Copy. Software that let me extract and sync my Music back to my Mac. It's re-backed up to SSD, labeled. And I unfucked my Mac Music a couple years after Apple had screwed me over.

I never got all my data back.

I had two sets -- one was full Music Library -- all the albums. And a smaller set that were the songs I liked and listened to regularly. I was able to recover the 3,000 songs, not the 10,000 songs in the full library

I'd gone through all the songs and ranked them (1-5 stars). And my Phone generally carried 3 star songs and above, and playlists I listened to regularly. But might not have every song on every album, or different versions of the same song, or some of the real essoteric stuff that I liked to have, but didn't listen to regularly. I lost that "other" stuff, until I find one of the original data sets in my archives.

Conclusion[edit | edit source]

I've defended a few of Apple's "questionable" policies. But this one isn't questionable, it's just wrong.
I never trust a software or companies with my data that shit on my data. Apple (and my own company Adobe) have both shit on my data and lost my trust over orphaned formats, or really bad data retention policies like this. If Google and Microsoft weren't worse, I'd move platforms.
The bitterness towards Apple over this shit, will not go away. They've fucked me over on data a few times (like changing formats in their apps, and then not keeping ways to read older versions of files in newer apps). If anyone criticizes Apple on violating a users data trust? Yup. I support the user.

Someone should have gotten fired over the incompetence around this.

Shitting on my data, knowing they were shitting on my data, and not warning me about it? Then being completely unhelful on recovering it? I'm used to that shit from Google or Microsoft. But they don't pretend that privacy and users data is saccrosanct. Apple does. They're just lying.

Lesson learned: never trust Apple with my data. If you don't have a backup for your backup, then you don't have a backup. Especially, if you're trusting Apple to do the right thing™. If Apple wasn't such assholes about App installation/defaults, I'd find a better Music App/Service, and move over to it, and never look back. But they keep me locked into their horrid little UI of Music/iTunes.

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https://www.wideanglesoftware.com/touchcopy/

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