Deleted iTunes on phone and iMac

BlackEdelweiss

My 7 year old son sat at my iMac about a month ago while my wife had her iphone plugged in to it and we were listening to a bit of music. He was there for about a minute and somehow wiped every tune from my wife's iTunes on the iMac and from her phone. This was obviously quite distressing for her as it had all of her music from the past 6 or 7 years on it. The only saving grace was that she still had a good library of tunes on her old iPod but fortune was not with her that weekend as the next morning as she was emptying the dishwasher she picked her old iPod out of the back of the dishwasher, nice and shiny with water running out of it after being in there for a nice how soapy wash!

I downloaded testdisk but got nothing and no searches online have given her much hope so as a last resort I have come to Boards where all my technical problems to date have been solved. Can anybody help me out with this, can the files on the iMac or iPhone be recovered. I think we can safely say the iPod is finished.

flyguy

Not an expert on this but if it was deleted the normal way it should just be in "trash" and you can just recover it from there. I guess you don't have a time machine backup? All music purchased form iTunes is free to download again at any time, but I guess not all music was purchased with iTunes?
There should be plenty recovery software available to look through the hard drive. Also check if there are any iPod/iPhone backups in iTunes, every time you've synced or updated your phone in the past a backup should have been made, if not on the iMac maybe on iCloud (if enabled). I would also just search the iMac for a specific song, maybe it's all still there but something changed in settings so they're not being displayed.
Also check if the Mac is not logged in under a different/guest user.

BlackEdelweiss

flyguy wrote: »

Not an expert on this but if it was deleted the normal way it should just be in "trash" and you can just recover it from there. I guess you don't have a time machine backup? All music purchased form iTunes is free to download again at any time, but I guess not all music was purchased with iTunes?
There should be plenty recovery software available to look through the hard drive. Also check if there are any iPod/iPhone backups in iTunes, every time you've synced or updated your phone in the past a backup should have been made, if not on the iMac maybe on iCloud (if enabled). I would also just search the iMac for a specific song, maybe it's all still there but something changed in settings so they're not being displayed.
Also check if the Mac is not logged in under a different/guest user.

Nothing in trash, searched for songs but nothing either. I tried the recovery software I mentioned in my post but it did nothing. Can anybody recommend a free one?

murpho999

Just because music has been deleted from Itunes and then synced to devices does not mean that music has been deleted from the computer.

You should have a library of music within an Itunes directory on your computer and you music will be sitting there.

Also, you could have Itunes rescan you computer and find music files on the computer by selecting 'Add folder to Library' and select 'computer'.