How to reverse the itunes organization that completely tore my library apart??

Question

Ok I am infuriated by whats just happened. I love music and have been pretty much building up a colection for many years. I've got (I had) more than 100 gigs of music nicely packed into their seperate folders of my choosing. I decided it's time to try out itunes for the visualizers and it LOOKS like a good player (or so I thought). I'd never used a music player to organise my stuff because it's always stupid in labeling things. But bassically, itunes not only stupidly arranged my stuff as usual, it ****** up my whole collection in the folders aswell!! Now here's the clincher- I'm a dj/producer and I had nice folders with all my self-created compilations of each genre i like. Thats completley torn apart, I forgot a lot of the songs in each so It'd be nearly impossible to make them again by hand. I'm ******* working on a new mix and now i just can't. Thank you apple. Now I have to find a cure for this before my job/hobby gets ******. I'm sorry I'm flaming a lot here but this is rediculous, can't itunes have a warning message about this?? Or an option to not let it rearrange your stuff?? Simple godamn solutions, itunes is on version 11 and none of these things are in place. So many new users have been/ are going to be subject to this ********...
Now to the question: Is there any way to reverse this? I've googled a bit but there isn't MUCH useful help, however there are some options I found.
1. Reverse the hard drive. Apparently it's possible to reverse the hardrive back to before you made a change. If this is true i'd like to do that even if It costs money
2. Get another media player to sort out the itunes rubbish. Dunno if I'll find one that could do a good job but any suggestions on this?
3. Use the itunes organisation and change it around. I do not want to do this, seriously it would take me weeks, but there IS someway to do this easily I'd like to know
Any help would be GREATLY apreciated, and especially on the first question
thanks

Answer 1

Hi. If you are really lucky the folder containing your media is protected by Volume Shadow Copy and it might be possible to restore the structure. That said 100Gb of data is a pretty big chunk so the change may have been ignored as too big to bother archiving. I'm sorry I don't have any tips to offer on this Windows feature.
iTunes only reorganizes data inside the designated media folder. And then only if you let it. The default install of iTunes will create a new empty folder for media to go to and if you had kept your media separate in some other location to import to iTunes then iTunes would have created fresh copies leaving the originals in their folder layouts. iTunes does not record the paths files were at when they were imported, unless they are outside the media folder and iTunes is not making copies, or they are inside the media folder but iTunes is not organizing them. There is no way within iTunes to undo such reorganization. Normally restoring a backup would take care of the problem but it seems clear that you don't have one.
iTunes has specific rules for structuring media, generally along the lines of <Media Folder>\<Media Kind>\<Artist>\<Album>\## <Name>.<Ext>. I have scripts that can be used/modified to impose a different structure, but that only works if the data to drive the organization is present in the tags. From the sound of things you have lost selections of media (effectively Playlists) that were identified by the location rather than the metadata. I can't offhand think of a way to retrieve that information.
tt2