Cupertino goes to great lengths to solve music deletion bug

May 18, 2016 12:06 GMT  ·  By
Apple's engineers spent almost the whole Saturday trying to determine the problem
   Apple's engineers spent almost the whole Saturday trying to determine the problem

Reports of a critical bug causing iTunes to delete music from users’ PC have made the rounds lately, with Apple customer James Pinkstone describing the problem in detail on his personal blog.

Pinkstone explained how iTunes deleted no more, no less than 122 GB of music from his computer, with Apple itself confirming the problem shortly after that and even delivering a fix for the app in order to prevent this from happening again for other users.

But this wasn’t the only thing that Apple did after hearing about Pinkstone’s problem.

According to a follow-up to this original post, Apple sent two engineers to Pinkstone’s house to try to determine the cause of the problem and to reproduce it in order to develop a patch that would eventually be delivered to all users.

“After lunch, we spent hours troubleshooting, but the problem eluded us. This time, the files remained, which was just one of many confounding elements of my whole saga. The problem wasn’t cut-and-dry, therefore has proven difficult to replicate,” Pinkstone explains.

Very friendly Apple staff

It appears, however, that the engineers had a really hard time trying to determine the cause of the bug, and even after several calls to Cupertino and remote connections, no evidence of an issue that would be at fault for music disappearing from iTunes was found.

The blogger goes on to explain that there were a few things that left all of them perplexed, including the fact that some missing files had different formats were part of different albums and genres.

In the end, the two Apple engineers, who Pinkstone claims were very friendly “yet very focused on what they had to do,” couldn’t discover the root of the issue, so it’s quite an enigma how the company actually determined what needs to be fixed with the iTunes update.

The lesson learned here is as simple as it could be: always, but always, back up your data. Although Apple has decided to go to great lengths to fix this, there are moments when your data could be unrecoverable no matter what. And a backup helps you make sure this never happens.