What does it mean when a box pops up saying "The song could not be used because the origional file could not be found. Would you like ot locate it?"

A  while ago, I was cleaning out some old pictures and music from my  computer. I noticed there were a lot of songs that I did not recognize,  and they had nothing to do with my itunes. I figured my step-dad or  sister might have put those songs on my computer or something. So I  deleted a few of them. The next day or so I realized all my music was  gone from my itunes. I still had the account but everything was wiped  clean, my music and playlists. I plugged in my ipod hoping it would  restore all my music but nothing happened, I still had my music on my  ipod and my cell phone. A friend of mine took my ipod, and put all of  the music on a hard drive, gave me the hard drive and I transferred all  of it in a folder onto my desktop. Then I drug that entire folder into  my itunes library. When I click to play a song through itunes a box pops  up and says "The song could not be used because the original file could  not be found. Would you like to locate it?" When I click on the song to  play it in the folder, it will go to itunes and then play it through  there. But I cant just go click on the song in my itunes and play it.

It means the media is not where iTunes expects it to be.
iOS devices are not and have never been backup devices.
Are the files in question still on the computer?
If not, you should restore them from the backup of the computer.  You do have a backup, correct?

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