Recovering Many Accidentally Deleted Podcasts

Question

Hi,
I’m in big trouble here. Upon completion of playing a podcast on my Mac (not through the iPod) I deleted it. Or so I thought, but I had my entire podcast library selected when I right-clicked, selected “Delete” and clicked “Move to Trash”.
Now I have 577 deleted podcast MP3 files (a few are video, actually) in my Finder’s trash folder and I desperately want to undo this gross faux pas of mine.
I also have a nearly up-to-date copy of all those files from the overnight backup I perform using ChronoSync. I carefully and quickly unmounted my iPod (from the Finder / Desktop, not iTunes) without syncing, so apart from the few new podcasts that were pulled in when I updated my subscriptions this morning, everything is there, too.
Other than that, I've done nothing, not even quit iTunes. I can find no commands to reverse this action (I seem to recall that in the old days the Finder could reverse file deletions to the Trash, but apparently that didn’t survive into OS X.)
What are my options for recovering my podcast library? If I copy the files (and directories) back from the overnight backup, will they be properly recognized as podcasts with the appropriate subscriptions? If this is the way to repair the damage, should I quit iTunes before starting?
For the record:
iTunes 7.0.1
Mac OS X 10.4.8
iPod w/ Video / 5G, 60 GB
No paid / DRM content among the podcasts
Thanks in advance for any help anyone can offer!
Randy Schulz
iMac 20" Core Duo, 2 GB; iPod 5G, 60 GB   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

Answer 1

William,
I should clarify that because the subscription entries in the podcast section were selected as well, they’re gone, too. From what I can tell, the MP3 files alone do not bear enough information to recreate my subscriptions, and that’s a big part of what I want to recover. If anything, I’d sacrifice the media files if I could recreate the state of my subscriptions. Downloading it all again would be time-consuming (and a few of the podcasts may have disappeared from their publishers’ sites by now), but that would be preferable to manually re-subscribing and re-downloading everything, especially since I have a varied mix of listened-to and unlistened-to podcast episodes among my subscriptions. And some podcasts I keep after listening to them and others I listen to and delete.
No, I need to restore the state of the whole podcast library, not just the individual media files.
Randy
iMac 20" Core Duo, 2 GB; iPod 5G, 60 GB Mac OS X (10.4.6)