Apple doesn't know why iTunes deletes user files.

But hopes to solve the problem by updating iTunes.

Apple confirmed yesterday that iTunes really deletes music files from “very few” users' computers, replacing the original music with DRM-protected files. The company has not yet been able to reliably reproduce the bug, but next week Apple plans to release an update for iTunes, which presumably solves the problem.

Here is what the Apple representative said in a comment to the iMore edition :

“In an extremely small number of cases, users reported that music files stored on a computer were deleted without their permission. We take these messages seriously, because we know how important the music is to our users, and our employees are busy identifying the cause. We have not yet been able to reproduce the bug, however, at the beginning of next week we will release an update for iTunes, which will add additional protective measures to prevent this from happening. If someone has encountered such a problem, you should contact the AppleCare department. ”
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About the unauthorized deletion of music files from the media told the composer James Pinkstone (James Pinkstone), who was able to recover a lost collection of 122 gigabytes of files only from the backup. Apple not only replaced the original MP3 files with the DRM version, but also replaced the files in the uncompressed WAV format with the worst quality MP3s (lossy compression).

A thorough investigation of several such incidents suggested that the reason for the iTunes bug, namely, the database error in iTunes 12.3.3 , which can really completely erase the user's music collection from the disk.

However, since Apple experts have not yet been able to reproduce the bug, it is likely that the reason is something else.

In any case, this behavior of iTunes is not regular and is not provided by the developers and Apple as the normal behavior of the program, so a comparison of the Apple ecosystem with Orwell's 1984 dystopia is completely incorrect.

On the Slashdot forum, we are genuinely surprised that Apple programmers cannot find the problem and advise you to skip the code through grep - and find all calls to delete() . Then carefully examine these code fragments: “If you can’t debug or are not sure what grep is, then it's time to go to management,” one of the commentators gives career advice.