I recently noticed that iTunes 7 had deleted several songs and podcasts out of my music library. The song still appears listed, but with an “!” next to it, and the actual file is gone. Others on the web have witnessed similar problems with iTunes 7, often times with far worse consequences. My set up is not exotic; all the the files are on a local hard drive that has plenty of space left. (And don’t think I could have accidently deleted them myself.) Of the 4 songs I know I was missing, I found two in my Mozy backups, by looking at the metadata in iTunes about when it was modified and then going back to a backup point when it existed. But two songs (the New Pornographers’ “Spirit of Giving” and The Knife’s “The Captain”, for the record) never appear in any backup, and I didn’t go looking for the missing podcasts. It seems the songs were deleted before they made it into the nightly backup. I filed a bug report with Apple, and haven’t received any response to a posting in their support forum. All the songs were purchased through the iTunes store which doesn’t permit redownloading purchased songs (except supposedly once if you contact support). Let this be my lesson about sometimes chosing convenience over DRM-free.