My son bought some itunes stuff over the christmas period and his ipod touched crashed yesterday. He hadn't plugged the ipod into his pc for a few weeks and he's lost the stuff he bought. Is there any way of getting it back via the itunes store? I've had a look on the account details but it just shows what's been bought with no recovery option. Seems a pain in the arse that once it's downloaded to the device there is no way of getting at it again.

itunes does give you an option to backup but I always neglect to use it.
The purchased music should be saved on the PC as well as the ipod though unless you deleted it, in which case its lost.

You have to write a grovelling email to iTunes and they'll let you download everything again. Best do it on a computer though and quickly back everything up

Looks like it's lost then as he hadn't plugged the ipod (which he downloaded the music onto) into his pc for a couple of weeks. Bit of a pisser that.

Yeh I was thinking of sending them an e-mail, do you reckon that will work?

It's stored on your hard drive under your Itunes folder (assuming it's a PC, not sure of the file structure of a Mac) – there are 4 folders (as far as I recall) and one of them contains the actual music.

Has he lost it from the Purchased playlist or just the player? If the player, plug it in and synch it and it should do the job…if it's just lost from the Purchased playlist, it will still be on your PC, just search for the artist or song and it will be there – drag and drop it on your Purchased playlist and it will reappear.

If it's gone from the PC then it's gone…

DickBarton he downloaded the music onto his ipod directly from itunes store and hadn't plugged his ipod into the pc for a few weeks so the downloads were never on the pc.

I'm going to drop them an e-mail now, see what they say.

Gary_M – I had the same problem a couple of weeks back. Have a trawl through the ITunes support pages, find the contact us bit and contact them through that. They will enable you to download all the things you've lost again. They will do this any time you lose your purchases, not matter what anyone on here says.

My Apple TV borked before Christmas and it failed to transfer my purchases from it to my main iTunes store on my Mac. I contacted them and they were very helpful and allowed me to download my entire library again, even though I'd only lost the music that I bought via my Apple TV. Apparently this is due to the fact they can't just authorise individual songs for downloading again. Email them. If it's their hardware that has crashed and caused the loss in my experience they will be very helpful.

when I buy from iTunes ( ok.. onto my PC ) I get a separate email, confirming purchase, telling me how much I've spent.. and part of that email is a link "report a problem" next to each song.

I don't know but I imagine your son must be getting these same emails.
( how many songs / downloads are involved )

worth looking into?

Thanks guys. I've e-mailed them on one of the 'report a problem' links I got on an emial. I'll see if that works, if not I'll try and find a contact e-mail.

Thanks for your help, this should cheer the boy up. He bought some stuff over christmas with a gift card he got so he was gutted. I said I'd let him download again and I'd pay so this will save me a few quid.

Good news just had a reply from apple to say everything has been made available again for download. The boy should be happy tonight. Thanks folks.

Remember: sync the Touch afterwards and let it back everything up. This allows apps to back up, as well as other stuff. It wouldn't hurt to have a second external drive and copy your entire music library onto that as well. Glad he's got his music back, it's heartbreaking when things like that happen, like my losing 80Gb of music through a stupid blunder. Fortunately some nifty software let me retrieve it all from the iPod. It's now on two drives…