Ouch. That stinks.

It seems like I hear this kind of thing about iTunes far more often than I do about other mp3-playing programs.

Is this because iTunes is more popular, or for another reason?

Itunes, or the latest iphone update, wiped everything off my boyfriend's iphone last night. He had to restore to an earlier backup. Lost his apps, phone book, everything.
I'm holding off on updating for now...

I suspect it's because iTunes has such a huge share of the market, more than anything.

I rarely have much good to say about iTunes, the iPod, or Apple, but in general I think their QA is as good or better than most other big software companies. Put differently, my strong suspicion is that if someone else were running the show, you'd see just as many--if not more--problems.

The growing Apple monoculture (iTunes/iPod/iPhone) is bad for a lot of reasons, but I'm not sure that overall software quality is really one of them.

worked just fine for me.

No problems here.

My experience says exactly the opposite of Kadin's; at least as far as iTunes goes, it almost seems as if they go out of their way to make it buggy. It's got tons of issues that carry over from version to version, and because Apple is trying as hard as possible to lock you into a co-dependent relationship between your iPod and iTunes, there's no good way to route around it (iTunes). I've never understood why it's so hard to get a mobile device to simply sync to a directory or library; my previous mobile device (non-Apple) did this perfectly back in 2002.

My Iphone didn't have any problems with the update this morning, but I talked to a couple of people at the office who lost apps and music, much like the linked article mentions.

No problems here either. But I was nervous about it.

itunes stole thirty bucks, every time I tried to order something it would keep charging me and never deliver. Customer service gave me a supreme runaround. So now I no longer buy anything from itunes.

Guess I'm safe, I've only got 11,750 songs on mine...

I have a policy of never using anything from Apple that ends in a zero, and that tends to save me from stuff like this.

I've never had problems with iTunes, but I do take a wait-and-see approach to any update. I also keep a full backup of my library.

iTunes is terrible on PCs. TERRIBLE. terrible. Dunno about on Macs. But it's terrible on PCs. I really like my iShuffle (didn't really like my sister's iPod when I borrowed it for a week--I think I'm in the minority who finds Mac interface seriously counter-intuituve) but I refuse to install iTunes on my primary PC because it's TERRIBLE.

iTunes is a pretty amazingly bloated pig of a program. All I want it to do is load my ipod and play music. I don't want to watch tv shows, buy music or do any of the twenty different things it does. And I really don't want something that takes over my whole computer and makes it grind to a halt just to play an MP3.

Well crap. I updated iTunes earlier today and haven't bothered to check if all my stuff is still there. I fucking hope so. I did do a Time Machine backup right before I updated, tho. Still, I'd hate to hafta restore. I have purchased Snow Leopard, and it just arrived today, and I haven't installed it yet. Now I are skeered.

hm, I must say I've never had trouble with iTunes. Of any sort.

I just ran all the software updates, got iTunes 9. I'm running Snow Leopard on my macbook pro.

the mister's never had troubles with his either. Granted neither of us use PCs and I hear iTunes is a serious homewrecker on Vista/XP so of course ymmv. But that's not been our bag of skittles.

i ran winamp when I had a windoze box and didn't use iPods of any ilk back then. the thought of running iPods on windoze boxen flat out skeered me. Still does.

my take is that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are nothing more than a pair of overgrown eight year old kids who deliberately design their shit to destroy each other's shit. Remember when you were 8 and had mud fights and went bike jousting and tried to figure out how to build the Excavator Ginormo Tonka Truck of Doom, with like roman candle duct tape dixie cup rocket launcher insanity all up in it, so you could annihilate that Archenemy Nemesis Kid Round The Way's GI Joes? yea kinda like that. only its software.

and just as a litmus test/anecdata, both our iPhone 3Gs are fine post update/install. Both of our macbook pros and his little 2nd gen Nano and my shuffle and the iMac and the big media drive have their libraries all intact and looks like it ran without a hitch.

now mind you we always, ALWAYS run a time machine backup prior to doing any of these sort of updates/installs, but then that's just us.

I like iTunes for Windows a lot, but it does test my love more than I'd like.

I wouldn't say iTunes is extremely buggy for me, but it is pretty slow and occasionally loses songs somehow, mysteriously deleting them from its database. That's not so cool.

No problems here either. Also no probs with upgrading the iPod Touch to 3.1.
Also Snow Leopard was fine.

I have all my songs and apps on my computer, though...so if my iPod got erased, I'd still have all the stuff on my computer and I'd just put it all back on the iPod.
Do people load up their iPods and then throw everything out?