Another non-dream related post, with apologies

One year later I make another post. This sporadic posting style should be over soon, as I approach the date of my viva examination for a PhD later this year. In the meantime, I wanted to post something somewhere to complain about iTunes, since their help system is so complicated that I couldn't do it there. To date, iTunes has spontaneously lost all of my music about five times. Most recently, it also lost all the music I bought through the iTunes store and a couple of movies I had bought this way. To get them back, I would have to download each one of them individually. Rather than go through the work of re-ripping my entire library of CDs (about 250 of them) and then downloading every single purchased item from the store--a process that takes about a week, I have decided to write it off as a loss and go back to listening to CDs. The albums bought on iTunes will be "upgraded" to hard copy CDs just as I did when cassette tapes went out of style and CDs took their place. At least, this is what I will do for my PC. My iPad is a different story. My iPad has never lost its library of music, not that it hasn't offered to perform this service for me many times. My version of the iPad O/S is old, but whenever it starts to download the new one, it warns me that to install the new system it will have to sync the music library on the iPad to the (erased) library on the PC. It does not offer the reverse option of updating the PC library to match the iPad. For this reason, whenever I get a message asking if I would like to update the iPad O/S to the new version, I cancel the operation. This means that my PC has lost my iTunes library, the money spent on it, and the time it took to transfer all that music from my CD collection (multiple times). In addition, my iPad cannot be upgraded without losing its iTunes library. My solution is to never upgrade the iPad until it dies and to never again use iTunes on my PC. To me it is like marrying a cheating girlfriend: why would you do it when you know you've been betrayed so many times before? To be fair, there probably is a way to solve the problems mentioned here without having to give up on iTunes or on updating the iPad O/S. However, whatever this method is, is not clear from the information I was able to find on the Internet or the Apple help site for iTunes after many hours of searching. If the information is that hard to find--even if it is there--it isn't worth my time to get it. AP