Recover playlists?

Hello,

I need help!!!

I was "helping" a friend with his iTunes yesterday and I've inadvertantly lost all his playlists.

Latest version of OSX Mountain Lion

itunes 10.7 - his personal preference, he doesn't like iTunes 11

All music, videos etc is stored on External Drive - everything is still there, perfectly intact.

Itunes Folder is in standard Music Folder on MacBook Pro

Unfortunately the last backup of the MacBook Pro was December 17

His iTunes was/is set up with all the music on an external drive.

He organised all his files manually - meaning that the checkbox in iTunes that says "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library" was not checked.

I was adding some TV series and thought it would be easier to tick the checkbox "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library" thinking that all his current playlists (approx 80 of them) would all remain intact and it would just add any new media to the external drive without having to copy it there first, then drag it into iTunes.

This was a 6pm yesterday.

He then looked at iTunes at 8.15pm and all his playlists were gone completely.

I assume that iTunes has overwritten the earlier library file - from 6pm with a new empty one.

I have looked at the date stamps for the iTunes Library.itl file and it says 8.15pm, which is the blank one. the only other previous iTunes Library.itl is one from the 17th of December, which doesn't have the 80 playlists in it.

I have a couple of questions:

When iTunes overwrites the iTunes Library.itl file, does the old file (from 6pm) get permanently erased?

I am currently running Data Rescue on the drive to see if I can locate the iTunes Library.itl file from 6pm.

At the time of writing it's got 7 hours of scanning to go.

I have looked at this article, but it seems he was able to locate his recent iTunes Library.itl

http://mwholt.blogspot.com.au

This support article still assumes you have access to a complete current iTunes Library.itl

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1967

Sizes of files in the December 17 iTunes folder

iTunes Music Library.xml 19.4mb

iTunes Library.itl 6.5mb

iTunes Library.xml 1.8mb

Sizes of files in the December 29 iTunes folder

iTunes Music Library.xml 12kb

iTunes Library.itl 4kb

iTunes Library.xml 12kb

I have read on forums about rebuilding the iTunes library, but I think that deletes the playlists doesn't it?

I shut the drive down at 8.30pm last night to ensure no more data was being written to in, in the hope of recovering the 6Pm iTunes Library.itl file.

Any help would be much appreciated.

My mate had put about 40 hours of painstaking work into his playlists since December 17 and I'm mortified that just hitting a simple checkbox in iTunes that I've messed up all his work.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions anyone has

🙂

Al