Music Library disappeared

Hi Bayou21,

We'd like to clarify this a bit more and, hopefully, this can help get this issue sorted out.

You do not need to purchase anything to recover your media. However, since the music and home videos were originally stored on your iMac, and synced to your iPhone, those items only lived on those two devices.

It sounds like you are paying for iCloud storage, and you believed that the music and home videos were stored through iCloud. Items can be stored in an iCloud backup or stored in realtime through iCloud. Check out this resource to learn what is included in an iCloud backup: What does iCloud back up? As you can see from this resource, Music and videos synced and/or stored in the Music app or the Apple TV app are not part of those backups. If your home videos were stored in the Photos app, those would have potentially been stored in iCloud if you enabled Photos in iCloud on your device. The option to save those videos from Apple TV is not available.

If you'd like to look at some of the information that is stored in realtime, you can get a good idea by visiting the iCloud website.

We hope you're able to recover these missing items from your backup, as it seems like that may be the best option for your situation. If you'd like to check into any other possible options, Contact Apple Support may be a good next step for you.

Have a great rest of your day!

Hi Bayou21,

Welcome to Apple Support Communities. We understand that you're having an issue with the music and videos on your iPhone. We know how important those are and we'd like to help.

Are you an Apple Music subscriber? Were the home videos stored in your Photos on your device? If so, have you looked to see if they are in the Recently Deleted folder? If you're missing photos or videos in the Photos app

Do you have available storage on your iPhone? Head to Settings > General > iPhone Storage to check.

Let us know what you find and we'll continue from there.

Take care!

Bayou21,

Thanks for the update!

Since your videos and music were originally synced from a computer, you may need to sync again to have them be returned. Let's see if that's what you'll need to do next.

You said the Music app was missing. Is that the entire Music app or just the media within it? If it's the entire app, make sure it's just not moved to another location or in a folder on your iPhone: Use Search on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch

If you're still unable to locate the music and/or videos, syncing your iPhone with your computer again will be the next best thing. When you gave the iMac to your niece, did you wipe the computer of data before that? If not, Sync music between your Mac and iPhone or iPad can help once you are near the iMac again.

Have a good day!

Bayou21,

Got it!

Since you're not a member of Apple Music or iTunes Match, your music library would not have been stored in iCloud. However, if you have purchases that you made through iTunes, you should be able to redownload those to your device by following this resource: Redownload music See if you are able to access some of your music that way.

As for the other music and videos that were synced, restoring data from your Time Machine backup should allow you to resync those items again. You will need to restore the Time Machine backup to a Mac in order to get that completed: Restore your Mac from a backup

Hope that helps!