[Nicolai P. Zwar]

I use iTunes 12 in the latest version and am not quite sure what or if anything was better in 11?

But yeah, that seems quite cumbersome. I mean, great that you have a backup! That’s the most important thing! Always keep a backup or two.

I try to keep things simple and easy (because I’m lazy and I know things can — and sometimes will — go wrong).

I use iTunes to curate my ALAC files, but it is that collection (including all corrected track names, covers, etc.) is what is backed up, so if I ever need to re-install iTunes, recreate the library, all I need to do is, as you said, “add folder”, and iTunes inserts ALL my music (some 120000 lossless/high-res files, so it’s maybe 3 TB or so) all by itself in one go (in the time I take a nice stroll with my dogs). Complete, with all the tags, all the changes. That’s it. No issues; I’ve done this several times over the years: iTunes does it all in one go even with a collection of my size. Since I don’t use iTunes as a music player, but a curating tool, I don’t have any playback settings or playlists in iTunes that I need to worry about.