iTunes will randomly erase your files.  If you google this, I’m not alone.  I’ve been noticing over the years that some music I haven’t listened to in a long time is suddenly just gone.  And not just deleted references from the iTunes database, but if you go and try and physically find the files, they are gone.  Usually what happens is I look in the folder for the album, and the album art is still there but no mp3s.  You can tell iTunes is the culprit because the references to the missing songs are gone from iTunes listing as well, it’s as if the music never existed… except for the tell-tale empty folder on your drive.

I just set my backup softare to never erase files but rather only copy over newer files from the main system to the backup.  This won’t get me back my missing music, and I feel like I’ll have to run the backup now everyday to feel safer about it.

There’s a lot of naysayers in the forums out there but I’m here to say shut up, this is really happening.

It seems there’s a long history of this related to iTunes but never any mention from Apple so I’m thinking the bug is here to stay.  You have been warned.