Apple sent senior engineers to customer's house to investigate music deletion issue
James Pinkstone, whose blog post about an apparent iTunes music deletion bug went viral last week, said on Tuesday that Apple flew two senior software engineers across the country in attempts to troubleshoot the issue.

This past Saturday, two Apple employees, identified only a "Tom" and "Ezra," flew from California to Pinkstone's house in Atlanta, Ga., in hopes of exposing a potentially devastating iTunes issue that wiped 122GB of music, some of it original compositions, from the musician's laptop ten days earlier.
Earlier this month, Pinkstone said iTunes removed most, but not all, locally stored tracks without his express consent, a nightmare scenario for users who have spent years, or even decades, curating their music library. An Apple Support representative was unable to pin down an exact cause, but speculated Apple Music compatibility issues might be to blame.
Last Friday, Apple issued a statement confirming that "an extremely small number" of users had reported similar problems. While the company could not reproduce the issue, it said an updated version of iTunes with "additional safeguards" would be released to address user concerns. The update was pushed out on Monday as iTunes version 12.4, but it appears Apple is no closer to identifying what, exactly, is going wrong.
This past weekend Tom and Ezra had Pinkstone reactivate his Apple Music account and proceed through the usual iTunes track syncing procedure that uploads unmatched files to iCloud for streaming access. Throughout the process, a specialized version of iTunes tracked potential code abnormalities, while the two engineers discussed options and next steps with a team back in California.
Tom and Ezra left Saturday afternoon, instructing Pinkstone to continue using the software as he would normally, for example buying songs, importing tracks and customizing playlists. They returned on Sunday to pick up the data logs.
After hours of troubleshooting and a real-world stress test, Apple was unable to reproduce the problems Pinkstone described in his initial complaint. The company is not yet ready to chalk it up to user error, however.
"One of the things on which Tom, Ezra, and I seemed to agree was that Apple is not off of the hook yet. Their software failed me in a spectacular, destructive way; and since I rang that bell, many people have come forward with similar stories," Pinkstone writes. "Some may be a result of user error, but I have a hard time believing all are."
Apple may not have a solution in the can, but the company is obviously making a concerted effort to find one. Perhaps most telling is Apple's willingness to send out two senior engineers -- cross-country -- to a customer's home over what amounts to a software bug. Few companies would do the same.

This past Saturday, two Apple employees, identified only a "Tom" and "Ezra," flew from California to Pinkstone's house in Atlanta, Ga., in hopes of exposing a potentially devastating iTunes issue that wiped 122GB of music, some of it original compositions, from the musician's laptop ten days earlier.
Earlier this month, Pinkstone said iTunes removed most, but not all, locally stored tracks without his express consent, a nightmare scenario for users who have spent years, or even decades, curating their music library. An Apple Support representative was unable to pin down an exact cause, but speculated Apple Music compatibility issues might be to blame.
Last Friday, Apple issued a statement confirming that "an extremely small number" of users had reported similar problems. While the company could not reproduce the issue, it said an updated version of iTunes with "additional safeguards" would be released to address user concerns. The update was pushed out on Monday as iTunes version 12.4, but it appears Apple is no closer to identifying what, exactly, is going wrong.
This past weekend Tom and Ezra had Pinkstone reactivate his Apple Music account and proceed through the usual iTunes track syncing procedure that uploads unmatched files to iCloud for streaming access. Throughout the process, a specialized version of iTunes tracked potential code abnormalities, while the two engineers discussed options and next steps with a team back in California.
Tom and Ezra left Saturday afternoon, instructing Pinkstone to continue using the software as he would normally, for example buying songs, importing tracks and customizing playlists. They returned on Sunday to pick up the data logs.
After hours of troubleshooting and a real-world stress test, Apple was unable to reproduce the problems Pinkstone described in his initial complaint. The company is not yet ready to chalk it up to user error, however.
"One of the things on which Tom, Ezra, and I seemed to agree was that Apple is not off of the hook yet. Their software failed me in a spectacular, destructive way; and since I rang that bell, many people have come forward with similar stories," Pinkstone writes. "Some may be a result of user error, but I have a hard time believing all are."
Apple may not have a solution in the can, but the company is obviously making a concerted effort to find one. Perhaps most telling is Apple's willingness to send out two senior engineers -- cross-country -- to a customer's home over what amounts to a software bug. Few companies would do the same.
Comments
He's an iTunes user who made a viral blog post about iTunes deleting his music.
https://blog.vellumatlanta.com/2016/05/04/apple-stole-my-music-no-seriously/
It gave Apple haters much to fap to and only went viral because it put Apple in a negative light.(something like StageFright or google going through android data won't go viral though)
It's also a rare incident like bendgate which Apple also responded to due to media hysteria.
After this went on for awhile we started noticing that when the phones got low on storage space that's when our music would be automatically deleted. We have since upgraded to the 64GB iPhone 6 and the issue for the time being has gone away. We will see if it returns when these get tight on storage space.
Has anyone else experienced this?
I saw it happen when my storage ran low too. Not sure if the problem still exists since this happened last year.
This guy is describing a different issue in the article though.
I wonder why with 122GB of music, this guy didn't create a backup?
Is it possible that this buggie code has made it to the desktop version in some shape or form?
Flame away!
I have a cloud backup service, and a couple of 500GB hard drives onto which I manually back once every week or so.
I'm stunned that someone would store that much data without a backup. That's almost wilful stupidity. And once you remove user error and trolls then we'll probably see that the size of problem is disproportionate to the number of web pages it's generating.
Still, people are stupid so Apple has to come up with a way to help them.
As a side note, it's not enough to just take backups. Every so often you should do a test restore to make sure it's actually working.
Of course it would help if there was some sort of provision allowing to aggregate multiple drives, but given how Apple arbitrarily removed RAID functionality from El Capitan, it's clear they won't add it to their Airport devices so I'm not holding my breath. Looks like you might be better off using third party solutions for serious backup needs.
You can get decent quality USB 3.0 keys of 128GB these days on sale for maybe $30 at best buy
If I count partial backups of only my top 20% best songs (yes, all my songs have been assessed for how I enjoy them), then it is probably 10 backups.
The incoming pile of songs is backed daily so at most I'd lose 1-20 songs.