How to restore to my one week old itunes match with all the songs?

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How to restore to my one week old itunes match with all the songs?

Hi there

Unfortunately I deleted a quarter of my songs in itunes match and I'm hoping to get my songs back through one of yours answers.

How it happend:

Because I was short in space I wanted to delete the songs, which are on my disk and i the match cloud. In order to do that, I sorted them according to the "on desk" item and deleted a huge amount. By clicking ok on the delete question it was done. The new changes on Itunes were changing this behavior i guess. Some hours later I recognized on my iphone that there are not all songs of my library. Not all deleted songs were bought over itunes.

So I guess i deleted (yes very stupid) a lot of songs which were not on the disk within this task directly from the cloud. Bin was cleared as well.

I did a time-lapse backup of my mac, but i guess, that my music libarie is not backed-up there because it was only in the cloud right?

Unfortunately I'm not able to open the backup because my external disk is lagging. I'm trying to copy the data to an other disk. but it would anyway not help I guess.

So does anybody know how to restore itunes match library to get back my deleted songs?

Thanks for your help

regards.

MacBook Air, OS X Yosemite (10.10.4)

Posted on Oct 7, 2015 6:33 AM

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Answer 1

Oct 8, 2015 9:02 AM in response to Nedi17

I am sorry this happened to you. If you use Time Machine (is that what you mean when you write "a time-lapse backup of my mac"?), then I do not know of a reason you could not retrieve the tracks by opening Time Machine and restoring an earlier version of the iTunes folder (specifically, the Music folder in iTunes Media). However, you seem to indicate there is a problem with your external hard drive. If your own files were indeed matched, then you can download the matched versions back to your computer's hard drive. Doing this will not replace your original files but will give you the matched version. In many cases, the matched version will be superior, but there may be cases when there was an incorrect match, in which case your only option is to try to go to a backup (the only recourse once you have deleted and emptied the trash).

If you are able to get the external drive to a working state or find another method to access the original files, you can restore them to the computer hard drive. Although I thankfully have not had to try doing this, I do not believe restoring the files would automatically restore them to your stripped-out iTunes/iTunes Match. Deleted files will have to be scanned and uploaded/matched again by iTunes.

Gina

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Answer 2

RTW's

Level 1

45 points

Oct 8, 2015 12:20 PM in response to Nedi17

Users beware - The latest versions of iTunes have changed this behavior. Before, when you hit delete on a file in iTunes, it would default to deleting the file from your library but keep the track in the cloud unless you selected the "also delete in the cloud" checkbox. NOW when you hit delete, the default is to remove the song from the cloud first and presumably the file from your library goes with it. It only physically deletes files that are in the iTunes file architecture; if they are stored in another directory or external drive, the files will remain untouched. But they will be removed from the cloud either way, and the only way to restore is to load the files back into your library and match them again. Or at least, that's how it appears to be working at the moment. If you don't have access to your files anymore, you may be out of luck.

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