Just to add a cautionary tale to this post to anyone assuming as I did - "It's Apple right? Surely my data will be far safer in their cloud than on my backup drive?". Wrong! I subscribed to iTunes Match for 2 years and painstakingly downloaded CDs accumulated over many years. I then removed all tracks from my local drives. I enjoyed over a years worth of trouble-free listening and was evangelical about iTunes Match and then, inexplicably, about 90% of my tracks (about 15,000) disappeared from the Cloud. There was no pattern, just randomly gone from across different artists and albums. Apple's Customer Services were an utter disgrace just hiding behind their T&Cs that the small print says that they can't guarantee availability. They ignored the fact their marketing implies that you don't have to the data on your local drive and maintained that it categorically does have to be available on the local drive. When I asked if I could record them making this statement, they hung up on. 6 months of e-mails and letters complaining have resulted in no apology and no explanation, just repeated quoting their T&Cs. As an Apple customer for 18 years, long before it was fashionable to be one, this episode has shaken my faith in Apple's integrity. Buyer beware.