Podcast consolidation was going well, and then everything went haywire on Wednesday night. As far as I can tell, pressing a couple of wrong keys caused my mac workstation to flip the ownership to on for the shared drive iTunes on my mac mini was using, which caused it to both be unable to write to the drive, and to start mass deleting podcasts.
I was up all night trying to recover from backups, and I’m now rebuilding from a May recovery of my iTunes library.
The task was eventually successful – I was able to recover all my Podcast library, migrate all the files to a new storage location, set up a new podcast downloader, and then set up Hazel workflows to copy files from the podcatcher’s download location, to the final archive.
From there, I have iMazing handling device sync to put files onto the iPhone – it works better than iTunes did.