I messed up my music archive with iTunes!

[bethewind]

Hi guys! I've had a 'little' problem with iTunes as I've had a not-so-brilliant idea of moving all my music files into iTunes and link my external hard drive folder as default music folder in itunes.

What happened is that now all my music files messed up in a single folder 'Not Added' inside 'Automatically add to iTunes' it's a 400gb folder containing all my music..in various formats.

Is there any way I could recover my old folder structure before I've messed it up with itunes? I use to have a backup..not anymore sadly now. I'm not so upset as I haven't lost all my files but they're totally shuffled all together and it would be a long work to try and recover that. Any ideas?

 

[chscag]

Is there any way I could recover my old folder structure before I've messed it up with itunes? I use to have a backup..not anymore sadly now. I'm not so upset as I haven't lost all my files but they're totally shuffled all together and it would be a long work to try and recover that. Any ideas?

Before you do anything... make a backup of your music before you do lose files. I recommend using a programs such a Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. I'm not sure you can recover your old folders without a valid backup. However, you may be able to come up with a comparable folder structure by using iTunes. Maybe someone else will have a better suggestion but re-arranging folders for 400 GB of music will definitely keep you busy for awhile.

 

[bethewind]

Before you do anything... make a backup of your music before you do lose files. I recommend using a programs such a Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. I'm not sure you can recover your old folders without a valid backup. However, you may be able to come up with a comparable folder structure by using iTunes. Maybe someone else will have a better suggestion but re-arranging folders for 400 GB of music will definitely keep you busy for awhile.

I'm gonna make a full backup as soon as I can..I used to have all my music folder backed up with Time Machine but for storage space limits I gave up that space to the backup of another drive! As in my archive there are several .flac files and different formats, along with compilations and songs arranged in a particular way I guess it will take ages to recover their order. I was wondering, would it be possible maybe to read an old .Spotlight-V100 or similar hidden file that might be have been kept in order to recover an old index file strutcure, if that even exist in those files?