iPod touch Protecting Your Music And Your iPod: How?

[wammygiveaway]

The latest news that Apple supposedly deletes all traces of your music without your consent or knowing has made me weary of downloading iTunes again. Even though my songs are stored in an external drive and I am not subscribed to Apple Music (a pre-requisite for said manner to occur, I suppose), I fear that connecting my external drive to a computer with iTunes installed with or without a subscription to Apple Music will automatically cause the program to "eat" my music library alive. It's basically a walking virus at this point. I want to know how to protect my library as well as my iPod.

One thing I intend to do is make a backup of my library to a device where it writes once now and reads forever later, like a CD-R, preventing the iTunes app from accessing and deleting my library.

There's a catch to this. A couple years ago, I lost the ability to run my DVD player as well as the ability to record DVDs and such, possibly due to iTunes. I don't know if this has been fixed. My DVD still works - it is connected and detected by my Windows XP, but as far as operation goes, I don't know.

But what of my iPod? That's the bigger issue. What are the odds that iTunes will delete my music from my iPod too? I can't trust iTunes at this time. As a precaution, I'd like a good free alternative for transferring music from computer to iPod as well.

What can I do to protect my library from undetected deletion, and what can I do to make sure my iPod Touch does not get hijacked?

Last resort: should I jailbreak it?

 

[ApfelKuchen]

You're way over-thinking this. If you don't trust, then you don't trust. No steps you can take are enough if you don't trust.

The person who lost the library was using Apple Music. Since you're not, that's not an issue.

Just go into your computer, find your iTunes Library, and make a copy of it to external disk. If something bad happens, you have a backup. You should have a backup of your entire computer anyway. There are countless ways you might lose the contents of your hard drive, this is just one of them. Protect yourself! If you have a Mac and use Time Machine and your library disappeared tomorrow, you'd just go back in time to today and restore the library.

Jailbreaking won't solve this issue. Nobody knows what caused that bug yet, so there certainly can't be a solution to it waiting for you in jailbreak land.

(added) If you hear someone got hit by a car while crossing the street, is your solution to stop crossing the street? Most likely, no. More likely, you take more care when you cross the street. In this case, "take more care" is to make a backup.

In this connected world of ours, if anything strange happens to anyone, everyone's going to hear about it - and the stranger and more alarming it is, the more likely we will hear about it. As a result, we've lost the ability to judge whether a risk is commonplace or extremely rare.

This problem is extremely rare, about on a par with hitting the lottery. When's the last time you won the lottery?

 

[Pakaku]

I back up all of my stuff regularly... and I also happen to be using older software and an older iOS.

 

[DUCKofD3ATH]

The latest news that Apple supposedly deletes all traces of your music without your consent or knowing has made me weary of downloading iTunes again. Even though my songs are stored in an external drive and I am not subscribed to Apple Music (a pre-requisite for said manner to occur, I suppose), I fear that connecting my external drive to a computer with iTunes installed with or without a subscription to Apple Music will automatically cause the program to "eat" my music library alive. It's basically a walking virus at this point. I want to know how to protect my library as well as my iPod.

One thing I intend to do is make a backup of my library to a device where it writes once now and reads forever later, like a CD-R, preventing the iTunes app from accessing and deleting my library.

There's a catch to this. A couple years ago, I lost the ability to run my DVD player as well as the ability to record DVDs and such, possibly due to iTunes. I don't know if this has been fixed. My DVD still works - it is connected and detected by my Windows XP, but as far as operation goes, I don't know.

But what of my iPod? That's the bigger issue. What are the odds that iTunes will delete my music from my iPod too? I can't trust iTunes at this time. As a precaution, I'd like a good free alternative for transferring music from computer to iPod as well.

What can I do to protect my library from undetected deletion, and what can I do to make sure my iPod Touch does not get hijacked?

Last resort: should I jailbreak it?

I gave up using CDs and DVDs for backup years ago after a slew of archives at work went bad from disc rot. Since then, at home I use a drive bay and two 3.5-in. disk drives (one for local and one for off-site storage) to back up each drive in my setup.

I back up the local drives regularly (once a week or more if I've made a lot of changes) and back up the off-site drives (which I keep in a gym bag at work) every couple weeks.

 

[gnasher729]

For the more paranoid: Time Machine supports backup to _two_ drives. If you use it that way, it alternates its hourly backups between the two drives. So if your Mac crashes or goes crazy, and your backup drive crashes, you still have the other backup drive.