James Pinkstone, a blogger and freelance composer, detailed on his blog post how his subscription to Apple's music streaming service, Apple Music, caused him to lose 122 GB of his own music from his personal iTunes library.
Apple Music did not recognize his original files when it matched them with its database, and so what it did was upload them into the cloud. Afterwards though, Apple Music deleted the files from Pinkstone's hard drive, only allowing him to listen to the files through the streaming service.
Pinkstone was able to recover his files through a backup that he made weeks before, but according to an Apple representative, the only way to prevent the problem from happening again is for Pinkstone to not use Apple Music.
That part may not be true though, as according to iMore's Serenity Caldwell, Apple Music will never delete songs from the hard drive of users without their knowledge.
The confusion apparently stems from a dialog box that pops up whenever users try to delete a song on their iTunes library when iTunes Match or Apple Music is enabled. The dialog box asks if users are sure that they want to delete a certain song, and the three options are to cancel, to remove the download, and to delete the song.
Removing the download will send the local file from the computer's hard drive to Trash, but the song can still be accessed through the iCloud Music Library.
Caldwell suspects that what happened to Pinkstone is that he unknowingly downloaded tracks on his Mac from his iCloud Music Library, causing the deletion of his original tracks due to Apple's matching feature. Either that or it was a bug that wiped off Pinkstone's files.
Either way though, Caldwell admits that the iCloud Music Library is "confusing as all hell," and the blame can be pointed toward Apple for that.
As such, Apple Music users should be careful in operating their iCloud Music Library and using the matching feature. A good suggestion is for users to always keep a backup of their music library on their primary computer before they sign up for a streaming service, so that if anything happens such as what Pinkstone experienced, users can restore their files and then just avoid doing what they did to cause their songs to be deleted.
