As someone who makes a lot of Apple Music playlists, both the handcrafted and “smart” varieties, accidental deletion is my biggest fear. About a year ago, that fear came true when I accidentally wiped out a playlist I had made for a half marathon. I had to make the whole playlist again, but it wasn’t the same. The songs weren’t in the same order as before and I couldn’t quite remember all the songs I had added previously. That’s why I was quite excited when I came across Hezel, an app that backs up your Apple Music library.
Hezel is easy to use. You open the app, allow it access to your Apple Music library, and tap the backup button. It takes a short while to back up everything. I have about 10,000 songs in my library and it took Hezel about 2-3 minutes to back it up. Once you’ve done this, you can be sure that all the songs, playlists, and music videos are safely stored in the app.
If you accidentally delete a song from a playlist, or even if you delete entire playlists, Hezel allows you to recover them easily. For testing, I deleted a couple of my playlists and opened Hezel to see if it could recover them. The app had my backup from a few days ago. I opened this backup and it took a couple minutes to compare it against my current Apple Music library, after which it showed the deleted playlists. I hit the Recover button and the playlists were pretty much instantly restored to Apple Music.
I now have a sense of security that I haven’t had before. The only downside is that once you recover a playlist, the name of the playlist creator changes to Hezel. It’s a small annoyance, but not a dealbreaker for me. The developer says that all of these backups are stored on-device and syncing is encrypted via iCloud.
Hezel is a free download on the App Store and you can make as many backups as you like without paying. On the free tier, you can only restore from the three most recent backups. If you want automatic backups and the ability to restore from any of your old backups, you can get the in-app purchase for $5.