Lost all my itunes music folder! please help!

About five days ago I transferred a few albums from my Macbook to my iMac via a firewire cable, using the Macbook as an external hard disk. From the folder in my Macbook, I drag and dropped the albums into iTunes on my iMac and they copied. My external hard disk which I use to store all my music (not my Macbook!) should have copied them into there, as usual.

When I came back to it later that evening I found that iTunes could not find ANY of my music files I had originally on there, it had deleted them for no apparent reason and they were gone. Disappeared! All that was left in my external hard drive was the files I had copied from my Macbook earlier.

I'm absolutely devastated as it's taken me three years to collect all this music, from friends and other colleagues. I had over 140Gb of music and 2050 albums at least. This collection was my life (slight exaggeration!).

Is it too late for me to find them? Can anybody shed some light into how or why my computer deleted the rest of the files? They are not in my trash can or anywhere else on my hard disk, I've used the search function and downloaded Disk Inventory X to see if I can located the files...

Need help guys, if anybody can share some knowledge I'd be very thankful.

Regards, Johnny.

Reading between the lines here a little, I suspect that iTunes has put them in the iTunes library on your iMac, but you do say that iTunes doesn't have any music in it?
I have no idea why it would delete them, but if it has you are not going to be able to retrieve them.
Go to your home folder and open the music folder>iTunes Library and have a look there.

I doubt iTunes deleted your music. Have a look here first:

MacIntosh HD/Users/your name/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Music/

Also, if you're using Time Machine (if not, you should be) you can restore from backup.

Thanks for the replies guys.

My music folder was set as my hard drive, time machine would not be able to back it up. So I can't restore a back up. Boo!

I doubt it has deleted it too, maybe a virus then? My house mate has had the same problem recently, too. Very bizzare.

Cheers.

Have the songs been deleted in iTunes or does it say that iTunes cannot locate the songs?

Are you sure the songs aren't still on your MacBook?

johnnytentoes said:

My music folder was set as my hard drive, time machine would not be able to back it up.

Click to expand...

This sentence doesn't make any sense.

I doubt it has deleted it too, maybe a virus then?

Click to expand...

Nope. No viruses for Mac.

my music folder was set to my external hard disk, sorry, not my hard drive. so when the music was copied from my macbook it went to my external hard disk. when i looked at my hard disk later (the itunes folder) all that was there was the music i copied a few hours earlier.

itunes still has all the track info and cover art from all the music files. it just can't locate them and neither can i!!!!

regards, j.

Have you looked where we suggested?

Have you tried to to type in a query in finder to locate any files? Maybe a general search of an artist you have (just one name) will locate one mp3 which may be able to point you to the location of all of them?