A cautionary tale about iTunes Match and Time Machine

I recently lost a fair bit of music thanks to iTunes Match. I want to share this as a cautionary tale with other iTunes Match users.

If you backup your computer with Time Machine, you can choose to exclude certain directories and folders, by going into options in the Time Machine pref pane. IF you use iTunes Match, you will probably see your music folder listed as an exception to the Time Machine backup. This was the case for me, and I was completely unaware that this expection was present.

I recently had to wipe my iMac ( at the apple store) due to an unrelated issue. My most recent backup was the night before, so the Genius and I agreed to wipe my computer. When I got home, I restored my user account using migration assistant. After doing that I opened iTunes and discovered that all my songs files were missing [ ⚠ next to all songs]. I discovered that the entire music directory, in the iTunes Media folder, was missing from my backup! I called applecare and eventually discovered that iTunes Match was the culprit. As soon as you enable it, it adds an exception to the Time Machine backup. The applecare person was also surprised by this behavior.

As a result, I lost a lot of music and need to download about 85 GB of music from the cloud...

Don't let this happen to you! Remove the exception from the Time Machine backup option. I hope Apple will change this behavior soon.