Ah. I saw they part about needing 30 hours to redownload his collection and thought this was his recovery strategy.
So it all factors down to "this software didn't do what I thought it would; had to restore from backup. Careful everyone" but was then radically over dramatized with "Apple stole all my music!!!"
Computer systems fail for all kinds of stupid reasons. What will you do when that disk fails?
I admit this is a particularly stupid and infuriating reason for data loss, but how little would it cost to have a backup of 122gb?