iTunes 12.12.1.16 update lost all music
I just turned on my laptop MacBook Pro to find that the latest iTunes update 12.12.1.16 wiped out all my songs and playlists.
I keep my music library on a USB stick in order to save precious disk drive while traveling. When the update happened the USB stick was not mounted, therefore when I launched this latest version of iTunes, all playlists and songs were gone, and only a few songs that are actually ON the boot drive showed up.
I redirected iTunes to the folder on the USB stick and relaunched iTunes, but the older list of songs (tens of thousands), and playlists still fail to show up.
What would be the proper and efficient way to restore all of this without having to rebuild the library and import all playlists?
I do have previous versions of the library, but not sure if they are the last updated ones.
This seems to be another instance where Apple engineers didn't take a situation like this into account. Is it really that rare that a library is stored on an external device??
any help would be appreciated.