Home "On IT" Blog January 19th, 2012

How to Restore Music from iCloud

Posted on January 19th, 2012 in Apple, iOS

Today, I realized that I didn’t backup my iTunes library of music before blowing out the hard drive on my new laptop. Ordinarily, this would have been a disaster. Lucky for me, the geniuses over at Apple had my back. Or shall I say BACKUP.
Since I use iCloud, my music and other items had been backed up to Apple’s cloud storage service. Here’s what I did to get my iTunes music back on my computer.

Download the latest iTunes
Login with your iTunes account (this must be the account that you used to purchase the music).
On the right side of your iTunes screen, go to Purchases
Click Songs or Albums to change the page view and All or “Not in My Library” to view your purchased content that currently is not downloaded on your computer
Click the download icon to the right of each item to download that item or simply download them all.

Thanks Apple, for saving us from ourselves!

3 Comments

Aaron Cervasio says:
October 18, 2013 at 2:45 pm
Hey, Wendy! Thanks for your question.
Unfortunately, iCloud / iTunes in the Cloud doesn’t backup any music from your iTunes library that was not purchased through iTunes. If you had a burned CD and copied that music from the CD to iTunes, then your computer crashed, even with iCloud enabled, you will not be able to retrieve that music.
However, all may not be lost. Even if your computer has crashed and the operating system won’t load, your data may still exist on the old hard drive. I recommend using this device to plug your old hard drive into another computer and then browsing the drive for your music files: http://www.apricorn.com/products/notebook-hard-drive-upgrade-kits/drivewire-ide-pata-sata-to-usb-hdd-adapter.html
If your old drive is physically bad or the data is totally corrupted or you’ve already reinstalled an operating system onto that drive, then there are programs and services out there that *might* help, but they are not guaranteed, may be very tedious and time consuming, or may be very expensive.
Hope that helps!
Best Regards,
Aaron Cervasio
Systems Engineer
Exigent Technologies
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Nikki says:
April 3, 2015 at 1:03 pm
Same issue here – got a new PC, “downloaded” all from the iTunes store but not all of my purchases downloaded and they aren’t showing up as purchased in the iTunes store. I’m missing a lot of stuff and I’m not particularly happy! Is my only option downloaded what’s missing from my old PC onto a jump drive and loading it into iTunes on my new PC? Really not wanting to do that!
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How To Access Icloud Songs On Itunes | Fresh Water says:
May 25, 2015 at 1:46 pm
[…] How to Restore Music from iCloud – Exigent Technologies – Hey, Wendy! Thanks for your question. Unfortunately, iCloud / iTunes in the Cloud doesn’t backup any music from your iTunes library that was not purchased through …… […]
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