And people wonder why I still refuse to rely on the "cloud" for most things. Your story is but a cautionary tale to the rest of us. Apple can't take away my CDs! No video streaming service can take away my movies!
When it comes to Apple & iTunes, I learned my lesson the hard way years ago when I accidentally had the "Let iTunes manage my library" option checked. BIG mistake. After many years of carefully curating my digital music library, iTunes shuffled up all my actual folders and files in its own "preferred" way, renaming everything along the way. Foolishly, I didn't have a redundant backup. A bunch of my music mysteriously disappeared too. Lesson learned.
IMHO this has nothing to do with the cloud, but mistaken functionality by Apple services on the phone.
I will suggest you are not safe... only storing things at home !
WHY:
CDs can disappear, so can your movies. I remember the story of one member of this forum living in New Orleans, where hurricane Katrina took his whole house into the Mexico Gulf, he had lots of backups but only in his house. everything gone forever. One of the worst things were childhood and family photos that can never be replaced. Material things can be replaced but some things cannot.
WHAT CAN YOU DO:
I keep all my photos on five different locations... HDD at home, Telenor MyCloud (provided by my mobile provider),OpenDrive, Google and iCloud (iCloud goes away now)
- Phones sync to Telenor MyCloud, Google and iCloud at the same time
- Manual copy of photos to a local HDD that automatically sync to OpenDrive, there is a quite affordable unlimited storage option, I do now have 1.8T of backups, photos and videos synced that way.
This is manual so that if any failure in phones, it will not be automatically propagated,
The backups in OpenDrive is encrypted with the strongest algorithm I can find and a password that should take 4 sextillion years to crack ... so the time to crack those passwords would be 289,855,072 times the age of the universe.... pretty safe passwords, yes I am paranoid
Use for instance a password like this :]?;n,[V.Sh#>K7:s(@JvQc%
If you would put your photos on Amazon S3 storage service, they have 99.9999999% guaranteed uptime, which means they guarantee less than 0.03 seconds unavailability during a year. And everything you put there will be stored in 3 different locations. Same with Microsoft, anything stored in the cloud is guaranteed in three different locations. If you pay more you can make it in additional locations, there is no limit.
ON PRIVACY:
you will say Microsoft is not safe.... thing is Scott Guthrie, vice president of Server and Cloud refused to provide private data to authorities according to a court order, with the claim he has no right to the clients data. He was facing potential jail time for disrespect of court, but this in order to protect client privacy. Microsoft is building data centers where not even Microsoft do have access to the data you have with them.
Would you be able to trust Microsoft with your data? I think the above answer that question. I don't use Microsoft and Amazon in this specific case due to pricing.
Google and Apple does not have the same history with privacy but if tehy want to use my photos, go on
CLOUD:
So my clear claim, if you want to be safe your critical information
must be in the cloud, just make sure you do it the right way so you are safe.
This unfortunately is a problem for any service, not just Apple, where you do not actually own the material, just a license to play it. If they go out of business, change the terms or are sold to another party then they are obligated, by the "Copyright" holders to assume worst case scenarios. When you terminate the contract, they take these kinds of measures.
The files were deleted because Apple treated the whole collection as part of the Music subscription, even though some files was under an actual separate license. Apple could of checked and avoided this but obviously didn't bother.
You do not own any digital material be it music, videos, films, software, etc. You own a right to play/use it, you do not and never can own it. Try reading the endlessly long, microscopic printed terms and conditions some time and see how little they care about you or your rights.
Of course you are correct in the licensing terms, but that does not give Apple the rights to fu#¤$ up my music library
