How not to manage your music, by Apple iTunes
Don't delete my files FFS!
So, I've got an external HDD that's got my music on it. I fire up iTunes, listen to some music. Great. I take my HDD home with me and forget to bring it with me the next day. I fire up iTunes at work to listen to some files on my laptop's HDD. Next day I bring my portal HDD back in with me and try to listen to some tunes but find that iTunes has DELETED THEM!
WTF!
Apple, when you're entrusted to look after a user's files the first thing you should do is NOT DELETE THEM!
It took me a while to figure out what had deleted them, I thought maybe my HDD was corrupt or something at first, but after loadingup the iTunes Music Library.xml file and looking at the order of files and comparing the remaining contents of my portable HDD to it I discovered that iTunes had started at the top of the list and worked it's way down deleting every file as it went. Luckily for me it stopped after about 200 albums or so and I had a backup.
What's worse, this isn't even an old problem, just search google for 'iTunes deleted my music' and you'll find many upset users with the same problem dating back to as early as 2006! However, unlike other users that have had their files deleted I don't own an iPod nor do I sync my music with any device. My guess it that at some point after disconnecting the portable HDD on the first day and restarting iTunes on the second day it decided to scan my collection and determined the files were 'missing'. On the third day after reconnecting the HDD and restarting iTunes for some reason decided to delete the missing files! Very very strange and very very broken!
Apple, this time I award you with the golden steaming turd - you REALLY can't code for shit...