Help recovering iTunes library after a disk failure?

Due to a faulty external hard drive, I have a daunting iTunes recovery task ahead of me. Does anyone have any tips that might help make my life easier? (In exchange I offer the tip that you should NEVER depend on LaCie external hard drives!)
Here's the situation:
- My iTunes library is located on an external hard drive (for space reasons)
- The external drive housing that library will no longer mount and based on the sounds that it makes when trying to spin-up, I am not optimistic that I will be able to retrieve anything from it.
- Thankfully, I made a copy of the "iTunes Library" folder onto another drive about a month ago (excluding podcasts).
- I have made some changes to the library since the backup (e.g., added songs, changed album/artist names slightly, etc.) which may have slightly affected the directory structure (e.g., changing the artist name will change which directory the file is in,), but the changes are probably not major and affect only a small fraction of the items.
Here's what I need to do:
1. I need to create a new library on the replacement external drive (easy enough)
2. I need to copy the iTunes files from the backup to this new library and hope that iTunes is able to "find" them there based on the directory structure (iTunes had auto-organized the library into directories based on artist, etc.). It would be a nightmare to have to go through songs one-by-one and "locate this missing item in the Finder"... or to have to delete then re-add the songs which would cause me to lose my playcounts/ratings/playlist inclusions. (Any advice about how to do this?)
3. I need to re-download podcasts (which were not backed up)... but it would be very nice to be able to do this without losing track of playcounts. (Is there any way to do this?)
4. I need to find a way to search for all still-missing songs (i.e., ones that were added or whose details have changed since the backup) so that I can manually replace these (either delete, re-rip from CD, or re-buy from iTunes). (Is there a way to create a new playlist containing all "missing" items, that is, items that iTunes can't find in the iTunes library?)
5. To avoid having to ever do this again, I need to set up some sort of auto-backup from one external drive to another. Time Machine isn't up to the task (can't back up external drives, as far as I can tell), and Backup doesn't just make a mirror. (Any advice on how to best accomplish this?)
Thanks for the help!
-Mike

See Recover your iTunes library from your iPod or iOS device.
tt2

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