iPod Largest iTunes library

i'm at 1.4 TB with most of it being tv shows.

questions how do you guys back all this up?

mine is to big for internal drive so in theory I need to buy a minimum of two 3TB drives for iTunes. one to run library and the other to back up the external.

I spent to much money on storage with the drobo and that is just a brick so slow and noisy! looking for a better options?

I have three 1-TB drives and a 2-TB drive in my Mac Pro plus four 1-TB drives and two 2-TB drives installed in three 2-drive external enclosures. I use a hard drive docking station for backing up to drives that are stored off-site.

I've given up using DVDs and CDs for backup since I had a rash of discs only seven years old go bad from disc rot.

My collection contains of 80 GB music, 300 GB films and 50 GB TV shows.

My mid-2011 iMac 27''/16 GB RAM/256 GB SSD/2 TB HDD is a dual-boot machine. This is due to the nature of my work, because as an architect I am frequently running Revit, 3D Max Design and Access (which are Windows-only software). I’m used to call these machines (halves of my iMac) The Force (OSX ML) and The Dark Side (W7U64). To squeeze every pound I avoid virtualization software and switch through BootCamp, i.e. in the working hours computer runs as a Windows workstation (Geekbench score about 15000) while on the leisure the computer is pure Macintosh.

Every machine possesses equal part of SSD (128 GB) as a software partition and equal part of HDD (1TB) as a data partition. The Force machine is backuped through a 2TB time capsule respectably The Dark Side machine is backuped through 2TB WD Elements external HDD.

The collection is mirrored on two iTunes (you know that you are allowed to authorize up to 5 computers): on iTunes on The Force (computer 1) and on iTunes on the Dark Side (computer 2). So basically I possess two equal collections on two machines physically on one HDD. Every collection is again stored on their respectable backup disc, which gives us 4 collections on 3 physical storages (double redundancy).

entropyfl said:

questions how do you guys back all this up?

Click to expand...

Get Backblaze. $4/month for unlimited online backup. It'll take you a while to upload it, but that all happens in the background and the Backblaze client is smart about throttling.

If you ever need to restore from the backup, you can download the files or pay them to fedex you a hard drive.

I have 43965 items, 119.1 days, 177.21 GB all music

What can I say, I have very eclectic musical tastes.

I have 37 Gigs of music!

I don't really compile movies on iTunes but I have around 300 GB of those.

NorCalLights said:

Get Backblaze. $4/month for unlimited online backup. It'll take you a while to upload it,

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Take a while is something of an understatement in places that are still on copper cable. 5TB at 1Mb/s upload (on a good day)..

I really hope I never have over 1TB of music. There's really no need for all that. I'm at 45GB for music, 51 movies

I'm currently reducing my iTunes library I've come to realize that accumulating hundreds of gigabytes of media content I don't use is exactly like hoarding and it's unnecessary. My goal is to have all of my music on my ipad (64gb) and have all of my absolute favourite songs on my phone (16gb).

I'm at 53Gb of music. Movies and TV shows is where it's a hog. Had to build a file server to hold everything - 8x2TB drives in Raid6 (12TB total storage). 2.5 Tb TV shows, 3.7 Tb Movies. Server runs a media server to stream to my PS3.


Been considering an Apple TV since I can mirror my Macbook to it... but since my Movies are mostly ripped in MKV-AC3 format, I've heard Apple TV doesn't support it. Haven't researched too much into it, but anyone here know?
Real problem would be playing Anime... not exactly sure what format that's in lol

Namtaro said:

Been considering an Apple TV since I can mirror my Macbook to it... but since my Movies are mostly ripped in MKV-AC3 format, I've heard Apple TV doesn't support it. Haven't researched too much into it, but anyone here know?
Real problem would be playing Anime... not exactly sure what format that's in lol

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MKV is a real pain to convert. Handbrake and iFlicks will work in some cases.

AppleDApp said:

MKV is a real pain to convert. Handbrake and iFlicks will work in some cases.

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I just use Handbrake. It takes ages with MKV but works.

If you're going -> MP4, you can check if the MKV is already encoded with x264, and just remux to MP4 - which will take minutes as oppose to hours .

4 TB and counting.

bma said:

I just use Handbrake. It takes ages with MKV but works.

If you're going -> MP4, you can check if the MKV is already encoded with x264, and just remux to MP4 - which will take minutes as oppose to hours .

Click to expand...

Only problem is that I need subtitles - hence why I use MKV. Is there a way to convert MKV's to a format that Apple TV can use with subtitles that are not hardcoded?

Walls are thin and sometimes I like to watch a movie late at night.

10117 Songs
174GB
Most at 256Bit AAC, some 320Bit MP3 however I'm slowly Re-Ripping to Apple Lossless so Size will slowly be increasing

Largest iTunes library? How many of the large ones are content exclusively purchased through iTunes??

I have mostly movies & tv shows around 2TB
Music some is 320Kbps MP3, 256Kbps AAC Matched audio, and Apple Lossless at about 1TB. I fitted a 4TB into the iMac and have a separate back-up drives for the itunes library specifically.

Namtaro said:

Only problem is that I need subtitles - hence why I use MKV. Is there a way to convert MKV's to a format that Apple TV can use with subtitles that are not hardcoded?

Walls are thin and sometimes I like to watch a movie late at night.

Click to expand...

Actually in Handbrake, i believe there is a way to add Closed Captioning that is softcoded into the film. I did this with a few movies and in iTunes displays the option to turn on Closed Caption/Subtitles.

i think you just have to deselect forced or burn in...but i think its alot easier now.

Namtaro said:

Only problem is that I need subtitles - hence why I use MKV. Is there a way to convert MKV's to a format that Apple TV can use with subtitles that are not hardcoded?

Walls are thin and sometimes I like to watch a movie late at night.

Click to expand...

yeap, w/ handbrake you can, I have movies w/ several subtitles in one movie in mp4 from mkv Hell, I'm converting one right now


As for the OP my music library is around 19K songs w/out counting CD transfers

frankblundt said:

Take a while is something of an understatement in places that are still on copper cable. 5TB at 1Mb/s upload (on a good day)..

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Who cares how long it takes? The upload happens in the background.

1.97 TB of Movies, TV shows and Music. I serve it all to 2 Apple Tv's through a DROBO.

I have a Firewire "Mount thing" (I can just plug a bare hard drive into it), I use that to back everything up about once every 2 months. Kind of old school on the backup but it works.

Woah! You guys have a huge ass iTunes library.

I only have 13.38Gb of music stored in my iTunes, right now. No TV shows, no movies what so ever.

NorCalLights said:

Who cares how long it takes? The upload happens in the background.

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Two problems: A quick calculation shows the upload will take about 16 months. And "unlimited" might be less unlimited than you hoped.

I recently lost my external drive which had all my videos on, so I'm down to 35gb!

NorCalLights said:

Get Backblaze. $4/month for unlimited online backup. It'll take you a while to upload it, but that all happens in the background and the Backblaze client is smart about throttling.

If you ever need to restore from the backup, you can download the files or pay them to fedex you a hard drive.

Click to expand...

1.4TB...? Uploaded to the internet? Unless you have unIimited internet that’d kill your data cap for years (literially!)

I have, 56GB that about 56,128,470,863 bytes, 13GB of that is music.