Lay My Hat

I reported how my PC had become totally muddled and relabelled all my short cuts as Adobe Acrobat files (amongst other issues rendering it pretty much unusable). I had a tech guy over last night and he restored all my icons to their proper state plus he updated stuff, did scans, defrag etc. etc. All great. However later that evening I wanted to return to my iTunes library as a recent Amazon download had failed to automatically transfer and I wanted to see if this had corrected itself or try to download again. Disaster! My iTunes library was completely empty except for the five albums I've actually purchased from the iTunes store (I tend to buy my music from Amazon as it's cheaper).

I have iTunes on my iPad too, and this carries most of my library apart from maybe the last four albums I've purchased, but the way the synching works it synchs from PC to iPad so had I not halted the process it would have deleted all my iPad content in favour of a look-a-like of my denuded PC content!

Any wise words as to how I reinstate my lost content? Rightly or wrongly I uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes onto my PC but the same miserable five albums showed up and not the other 40. This is a big problem for me as my PC is my music system - I play all my music from my iTunes and don't have any other music player in my apartment.

As far as iCloud is concerned, is it correct that when you send stuff to the cloud it only allows storage of Apple purchased content?

Non Apple geek here, sorry

I emailed the techie who came over on Tuesday, but he's a Microsoft engineer and also a non Apple geek sadly If I have time over the weekend I'll have a detailed Google for some hints and tips.

I cant really help but our icloud stores all our content including loaded stuff thats not bought through itunes,

cant get it to download though !!

the apple forums are better than google for apple issues though,

good luck

pete

Thanks Pete. I didn't know that about iCloud. My iPad's memory is almost full so I am going to have to send some stuff to the cloud and at least I know that I can do this with non-Apple content too. So if I send my iPad contents to iCloud and then drag it back down onto my PC that should work shouldn't it? I can then synch my iPad to the PC and restore the content to that device too.

in theory , yes,

initially we had to pay 20 euros, then .99 per month, we did this because we renewed our pc last year where the original itunes stuff was and we had uploaded all our cds, this then sits in the cloud and downloads when and if it feels like it (that means I have managed to download the cds onto my ipad but not my iphone !! also the pc plays from the icloud)

I think, (sometimes it has been known !!) that if I plugged in the istuff to the pc it would then download, although I think that I should be able to do that over wifi,

UPDATE: After several evenings of reading up on Apple user forums, trying out the suggestions and basically getting nowhere I decided to pay for telephone support from Apple. The nice American chap was very helpful and assisted me in identifying certain issues but couldn't help with the missing content not purchased via the iTunes store. However once I'd done the fixing he'd suggested I was able to a) play the pathetically small content surviving in my library and b) export my Amazon content to rebuild my library. Result. And in the end he didn't charge for the advice so that's Result x Two.