Redirection help to retrieve broken links

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi, my hosting company after they updated my joomla website lost thousands of pages of content, i am now searching for all broken links and re doing the content to get my links back, but i am having a problem understanding how to redirect these links.

For example, i have now managed to retrieve this page

http://www.in2town.co.uk/news/have-your-say/liberal-dem-leader-says-he-will-be-the-next-prime-minister-what-do-you-think

but the old url for this page was

http://www.in2town.co.uk/Have-Your-Say/Liberal-Dem-Leader-says-He-Will-be-The-Next-Prime-Minister-What-Do-You-Think/menu-id-4953

i do not have the unfriendly url for this page, so what i am trying to find out is, how to tell google that the above page is now

http://www.in2town.co.uk/news/have-your-say/liberal-dem-leader-says-he-will-be-the-next-prime-minister-what-do-you-think

in my joomla site. if anyone could please explain how to do this with joomla 1.5 then you will make me very happy as then i will be able to retrieve some of my lost links

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi after reading lots of pages, i have found how to do it with joomla, but it says it is better to do it within the htaccess file, not sure if this is correct or not.

What i have done is used the Aliases feature where i have put the old url in there

[ClaireH-184886]

Now i have worked out how to do this, can anyone let me know if this would be wasting my time. I am correct that it is good for seo to find all my lost pages that are generating good links and putting the content back on my site to gain that link juice.