Paid Music Mysteriously Disappears

[mnewman]

This morning my girlfriend and I were listening to iTunes, including the Linda Ronstadt Christmas Album that I bought from the iTunes Music Store last year. Then we went out to see a movie.

When we got back home I decided to play some other paid music and found that about 50% of my paid albums were missing in action, including the Ronstadt Christmas album that we had played earlier this morning.

(I should note here that no one else has access to our apartment or the iMac inside.)

No problem, I think. I have a backup. Carbon Copy Cloner clones my internal drive to an external drive shortly after midnight every day. Sure enough, it ran and finished at 12:47 this morning.

But, all the paid music that had been deleted from my internal drive was also missing from the backup drive!

Fortunately, I have been able to restore from our iPods.

But, how could this possibly happen? How could paid music, and only paid music, be deleted from both our internal and our external backup drives during the several hours we were away from home watching a movie?

Any and all explanations gleefully considered....

[acme.mail.order]

De-authourized iTunes maybe?

Are the files really, truly gone? (you checked with the Finder, and Terminal?) or are they just missing from iTunes?

about your daily backup: do you simply clone, or make a disk image? The latter I think is a better choice for backups as it can't be modified as easily.

[somefool]

I back all my itunes store aac/mp4 files on to cd every feew weeks too, JUST INCASE.

[mnewman]

The files are truly gone. iTunes was not deauthorized.

The backup is a clone.

Fortunately, the iTunes library is backed up to two iPods, so recovery was possible, if not easy....

[michaelmage]

this just happened to me just now! I checked my fw external (where the library is) and the tracks are physically not there. I ran disc warrior on the drive and it eluded to some evil stuff going on and that it was all fixed, but the tracks are still gone

what do I do now? :confused:

[mnewman]

I managed to recover almost all of the missing music from my iPod. I used some software called: iPod->Folder 1.2

But, since my old 5GB iPod is smaller than my library, some tunes are gone forever.

In my case they disappeared both from the library and from the library backup that I do nightly.

Very strange indeed.

[mmkerc]

Something very strange is afoot here. If Carbon copy ran a clone at ±1:AM and you listened to Linda later in the morning, left and came back before a new clone was run how did Linda disappear from the clone? Very strange indeed! I assume you are running some version of OS X which would rule out a virus. WRT the earlier post of de-authorization I assume you checked that and all was good?

Can you boot in a different OS? 9 maybe? Have you done a file search for all *.m4p files? this happened to me a while back and I found the files in a different location then where they should have been.

[hayne]

If Carbon copy ran a clone at ±1:AM and you listened to Linda later in the morning, left and came back before a new clone was run how did Linda disappear from the clone?

I'm assuming that the Mac was on and the external drive (with the clone) was on and mounted on the Mac. Thus any program that wanted to delete files from the internal hard disk could just as easily delete them from the clone. E.g.: find / linda.mp4 -exec rm {} \;

So (assuming the files are in fact gone) it is strange, but the strangeness is that there was some program that deleted those files and no others.
Is it possible that the Mac was open for someone to ssh in? Or that there is some trojan installed? I would check my logs carefully.

[mnewman]

hayne is right. The backup drive is an external firewire drive that is always connected. So, any program that wanted to erase files would be able to do so on either the internal or external (backup) drive.

I did check the logs at the time. Although I get constant unsuccessful ssh and http buffer overrun attemps, I saw no successful log in on that day.

I should point out that subsequent to my original post I discovered that some non-paid music (ripped CD's) was also deleted. But, it was always complete albums that were gone, not individual songs.

I did search both drives for the songs and came up with nothing.

Fortunately, I did manage to find all but one album on our two iPods. And, that album was on a CD. So, no net loss. Just a huge mystery and a huge amount of time trying to figure out and then fix it.

[acme.mail.order]

I discovered that some non-paid music (ripped CD's) was also deleted. But, it was always complete albums that were gone, not individual songs. The plot thickens. If by 'complete albums' you mean folders, could we possibly have directory corruption? The file system entry for the directory is disappearing, and Ms. Ronstadt along with it?

Depending on the exact mechanics of ditto (the program CCC uses to do the work) the corrupt data could be copied as is.

Is anything else missing?

Are your songs on a separate partition?

In any case, a backup, reformat and restore would be a good idea. If you are thinking of getting a bigger drive, now is the time.

And to fully eliminate the trojan/virus issue, install the OS from cd, update, then restore applications and user data only.

[mnewman]

I don't think directory corruption is the issue. The identical albums disappeared from both the internal and backup drives on the same day. There is no question that CCC copied the corruption. We played a song in the morning, after CCC had done its backup for the day. That same afternoon the song (and album it is on) was missing from both the internal drive and the backup.

The vast majority of "disappeared" music was paid music (iTunes Music Store), but a few ripped albums (in their entirety) were also gone. For example, Hawaiian Slack Key Masters Volume II was completely gone, but Volume I (in the same subdirectory) was in tact.

It iTunes library is located in: /Users/Shared

Nothing else missing.

No similar trouble before or since. Just that one day.

[Spiggy]

This is very interesting. I searched this subject because it just happened to us. Most of my daughter's iTunes suddenly disappeared, and I insisted that the songs didn't just vanish, there must have been user error, blah blah.
Nope. Just vanished. I did all the usual OSX things to find wayward files but nothing helped. Think harder, I say. That's the story, she says. Big argument.

But...wow. All I can add so far is that nearly all of the iTunes store music is gone and recovery programs so far aren't acknowledging their existance. Same with most of the ripped music. It happened while reorganizing and consolidating the songs. I know there's lots of room for obvious mistakes in that, but I'm convinced this didn't happen because it's not a case of an empty folder being finder copied over the full one. The library location didn't change, either in the prefs or on the drives.


If anyone has any new clues about this, please chime in. It's on 10.3.9, and no system shaking (permissions, caches, etc) has made a difference.

Thanks.

[Anti]

This happened to me a while ago, with two Coldplay videos. I formatted my drive, thus losing the video, but I thought "Hey, I'll just Senuti it off my 5G iPod."

Wrong. It wasn't on the iPod. What th-? It was there before I reformatted!

Well, I learned my lesson with that one. I never found it.

So really, unfortunately, all you can do is try to prevent it again.

So if it happened to me again, I'm covered. I got a complete backup on my G4 server, and if that and my MBP should die, it's all on my 5G iPod. If it should disappear, it's on my two iPod nanos.

But how it disappeared from your backup is beyond me. That is EXTREMELY strange.

[ArcticStones]

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Question: What version(s) of iTunes are we talking about here?