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I just transferred purchases and everything that wasn't transferred was deleted

So, basically, a few months ago my iTunes file was corrupted somehow and I had to delete it. I never felt the need to redownload it because I never need to sync my iPhone anymore - I just download what I want straight to the phone. But, today, I did. I have purchases across two accounts (one that was a family account that I used when I was younger and now another account that is my own), and I downloaded some old stuff from that family account - then immediately realized I wanted to download some old stuff from my newer account. Of course, I couldn't because I had just switched accounts and I need to wait 90 days to download past purchases from another account. That's fine. So my solution was to redownload iTunes, transfer all the purchases on my phone to my computer, and then download those old purchases I wanted to the computer so I could have everything on my phone. It did not work as planned at all. When I went to transfer purchases, I couldn't transfer the songs/apps from my older account because the computer wasn't authorized. I went through with the transfer, thinking I could just authorize the computer after and transfer again. I was very wrong. After transferring the purchases from my newer account (only about 30% of the stuff I own), my phone deleted EVERYTHING that wasn't transferred - including both the songs/videos/apps from the older account and songs/videos that weren't purchased through iTunes at all. Now I have the huge inconvenience of redownloading the selected files I want from my old account, losing saved progress/files from deleted apps on that account, and losing many songs/videos that I have no way of recovering. So, the question is: is there anywhere I can recover these files? (The only backup I have is the default iTunes one, which was no help because it doesn't include music/videos/apps.) I have no idea why iTunes would think I wanted to delete the things I didn't transfer, but that's a whole other topic.

iPhone 6s, iOS 9.2.1

Posted on Feb 7, 2016 11:08 AM

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1 reply

Feb 7, 2016 1:29 PM in response to anonymouspseudonym

So I explored some other threads on here and found that I can't recover my library, which is annoying enough, but in one of those threads (talking about preserving your library) it says to save non-iTunes files to another program/device before transferring purchases. This is a known "issue" (or shortcoming of the program), and yet I received no warning prompt telling me so. Nice.

I just transferred purchases and everything that wasn't transferred was deleted

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