Why did iTunes 11.1 (126) delete all (SEVERAL HUNDRED) Podcasts?

I guess it just doesn't happen, but Apple really needs to explain how podcasts are supposed to work, now.

I realise they have bigger problems - WHEN iMessage fails, I have to restart my phone to get messages sent, for example. More than a little embarassing, but podcasts and iTunes just seem to get more and more broken with every release.

As customers, we need to know, because there are alternatives and if Apple intends killing podcasts by a thousand cuts - we just don't need the drama. It's a nice ecosystem when it works… Podcasts app never displays the correct album art, doesn't honour Playlists from iTunes (and if you think I'm going to manually create playlists on my phone, you've got to be kidding), and I'm sure everyone has a pet peeve they can add to the list.

I use iTunes to put content on to portable iThings, because Apple doesn't supply any other method. A lot of my content is self generated - Eye TV recordings, my own videos and music, etc. and I need an automated way to get this content on my iThings. I can dropbox this through the internet or any other trick available, usually relying on downloading, which isn't unlimited in countries besides the US, neither is it fast.

You can see the trend - Hollywood would rather sell you something that you have to stream every time you watch it, so you never end up with a physical producat at all, not even bits! And Apple seems to be going the same way - you don't need the storage, we'll stream it to you, IF it's still in our library. Oh you have you're own content, well we'd rather you bought it from us…

All this is to say - I don't think it's a bug, I think it's a deliberate direction, and if Apple don't feel compelled to speak about it, perhaps a petition is what's required.

Clearly there's ZERO noise in the media about this, so there'll be no appology letter. Podcasters can't afford to anger their distributor, and we customers get to spend days recovering our data.

And if you don't think I'm PAYING for podcasts, think about this - I had no interest in iPod, until podcasts arrived. They are my principle use for iPod functionality - I buy Apple products for podcasts, which are supplied to Apple for free.

<Edited By Host>

Now I saw that lots of episodes from my podcast's are missing as well. Apple please FIX IT cause it's not cool. As I am buying apps from the app store and dont cheat with the apple brand so they have to respect me and you and us and fix this god **** ******** problems with itunes.

Sadly I'm afraid if you've lost podcast episodes the damage is already done. While Apple can, and no doubt will, address the features in the software that triggered the problem, they can't reach into your computer to restore the files that have been deleted. You need to restore your own backup, or try to use some deleted file recovery software if you don't have a backup.

When experienced computer users bang on about the need for backups this is why!

tt2

turingtest2,

You are saying if you are not experienced computer user, do not buy Apple products. Besides what to do when iCloud is screwed up. How to restore?

Read great summaries from multiple users in this topic. Those summaries is the great post-mortem executive summary for Apple executives. I am not sure if they care unless sales will go declining.

No, I'm simply saying that everyone should back up their data. Too often people only learn this lesson from painful experience, whether it be lost/stolen hardware, hard drive failure, user error, or as I see it in this case, an upgrade with some unintended side effects.

tt2

Respectfully I am telling you that I found out how to deal with this problem and I am not a rookie with the Apple products. You only need to think for five minutes and not backup all your hard-drive. You Americans think you can find quickly the solution by offending others like your on top of the world. Well your not. It's all about the knowledge. I found out that you have to go in the podcast menu of the artist and click on the ,,show old episodes" and there you have it. It will browese all of them.

Have a nice day.

you were lucky. 11.1.1 was worse than 11.1 for me. After restoring everything from backups, I downgraded back to 11.0.5 and stuff has been stable for me (again). I will not upgrade itunes again until I know this issue is resolved. I've had to spend hours and hours restoring my library twice now with this nonsense.

Not that it matters, but I'm not American...

If you were able to redownload all your missing episodes from the podcast feeds then that is great, but I have episodes from a number of podcasts that no longer exist or only provide episodes for a limited time. Some have lost episodes from subscription services which would have to be paid for again. Other users are complaining that their broadband data caps make redownloading their old episodes either impractical or prohibitively expensive. And then there is all the other data that could be lost from your hard drive if it dies. My advice remains to make your own local backup of all your important data. I'm not sure why you think making that advice might be offensive, but I make it to the readers of the topic as whole, not you in particular, and with no intent to offend anyone. And for anyone that has lost data that can't be recovered I've pointed towards a potential recovery tool.

tt2

This only works if that option shows on the software. It doesn't always. And deleting podcasts doesn't always work either.

Glad you were able to find an option that worked for you on your equipment. But don't assume it is the same for everyone else - American or not.

Thanks to turingtest2!

I was able to resolve my iTunes 11.1 woes by disabling the podcast settings sync function. Surely, in a future update, apple should make the iTunes settings override iOS devices by default!

I have the same story. I saw the "fixes a problem with deleted podcasts" and I believed them, stupid me. I agree. Its worse. There are problems with feeds now. Alot of my podcast episodes don't even show up anymore. My first thought was, "By fixing, we at apple mean we are going to make it so that the podcasts we deleted don't show up on your feed anymore to remind you. Have a nice day"

I've been an apple customer for almost 9 years year now. Before there was an iPhone.

In between 11.1 and 11.1.1, I had simply downloaded a good portion of my deleted podcasts again, well over a thousand episode. Then 11.1 deleted them again!!!!! Really?! Then I saw the 11.1.1 update and now its even worse. I cant even download them again anymore.

Im sure you mean iTunes> Preferences> Store

I just did that. thanks for your help. Again, I shouldn't have to do this as I DO want to sync my podcasts and settings.

My podast settings did not change, they remain keep all.

And the Show Old Episode controls do nothing. The old episodes flash there for a few milliseconds and go away. Clicking the cloud icon does seem to download some of them again, but not all.

Lastly, My iTunes library i almost a TB. Its on an external portable HD and I do back it up about once a month so actually, I really do still have my episodes on my back up.

However, even restoring the episodes are a HUGE pain in the butt. I have to figure out which episodes apple chose to delete and which they did not. I'd don't want a bunch of duplicate episodes.

I've restored podcast episodes to my iTunes library before and my experience has been:

a) iTunes does not recognize podcasts dragged into your iTunes library as podcasts and puts them into my music library. I have to create a recently added playlist to access the files easily and edit the metadata and call media kind: podcasts. But even if I do that....

b) I usually have to add more metadata like artists and/or episode numbers and/or album names. If I only change the media type to podcasts, the disappear from the iTunes library all together and are not able to be found. (This has seriously happened to me.) This is a big pain because iTunes doesn't let you have two information windows on a file open at once. So I have to go back and forth. But even then, if I match all of the metadata to the rest of the podcast episodes...

c) iTunes still doesn't put them in the same podcast. I have had to restore or add episodes before and no matter what I try, I have multiples of the same podcasts with different episodes.

I sincerely thank you for you help. I already knew what I need to do. I just really really shouldn't have to. I am one of the few out there who does back up his external hard drive (I do it about once a month as opposed to my time machine that does my laptop every hour.) If my iTunes drive failed, the recovery process would actually be easier than what I have to do to ix what apple has done to my podcasts. I am really p!$$3D about the whole thing.

There is something really really offensive to me about apple deleting files off of MY computer. Even worse, they have deleted them off of MY external hard drive. They aren't even in the trash, they are gone. That is screwed up. And it is happening because of the amount of control apple assumes you want them to have over your product, and it going haywire.

You should be able to restore the contents of the podcasts folder alone, merging with any files that already there, then restore the dated iTunes Library.itl file made during either the iTunes 11.1 or iTunes 11.1.1 upgrades. I'd then use iTunes Folder Watch to bring the library up-to-date with the contents of the media folder.

tt2

Thanks turngtest2!

I think this solved my problem after losing hundreds of podcasts (most more than once, after restoring from a backup). The podcast syncing across devices didn't work very well anyway and is basically worthless. It will be quite a while before I try syncing across devices again! ....if ever.

This was just about the worst experience I have had with Apple software. Very disappointing.

Dave

Just an update.When last I posted it was about transferring to gPodder which is stable and works.

Not only did iTunes delete my whole library stored on my computer I have the complication of a small data cap from Suddenlink. The initial problem of having episodes I had deleted keep downloading over and over used up a lot of bandwidth just trying to figure out what was wrong and to stop it. So when I restored my library from Carbonite (thank god for Carbonite) over the internet it also increased my internet usage for several days. Needless to say, even though I limited my internet usage for the rest of the 30days, I went over by a few GBs. I thought some of you might like to know what an ISP does to you when it gets mad at you for an overage. It redirects all your internet searches and sets off all your security software that someone is hijacking your search engines. By the time I figured out what had really happened instead of what my security software was telling me they were trying to do, count a couple of hours of wasted time. My security does not allow me to go to that sort of redirected site. Soooooo then I called their help line... got connected to their pay the bill line instead (not my fault), was going through endless messages about paying bills online - in frustration I hit zero - sometimes that gets a real person. In this case it did - the wrong person - but she was nice and transferred me to a proper tech line. Then I waited. Finally a very nice tech guy came on and said I would need to authenticate a usage policy and that is what I was being redirected to. I explained that my security software does not allow me to go to a hijacker's website. After some discussion he gave me a direct address I could type in. That got me to the usage policy. And then a message popped up that said it would take sevral minutes to restore my service. To make the whole experience more "exciting" the Suddenlink website where one can check on usage was down or giving bogus info all last week. One time I checked and the whole month of October was gone. LOL. I was tempted to go to Subway or Starbucks to use their GBs but I didn't have that much time to spend away.

What a waste of time and energy. It will be a long time before I knowingly sync anything important with an Apple cloud again. And now my ISP will send me nagging emails warning of dire consequences every time I even get near the data cap ever again. Sigh! What fun! 😢

So Apple, if you ever listen in on this community, next time some exec has a bright idea, let a few ordinary users beta test it for you BEFORE you unleash it on the rest of your customers, if you want to keep your customers and your reputation. I can only imagine how some of these people feel after losing their old, now unavailable, but treasured podcasts, and who did not have a service like Carbonite.