I need to restore my Macbook Pro and never set up Time Machine. I wanted to back up my photos on iPhoto and music on iTunes, and wanted to see what the best way to do it is. Unfortunately, I'm not planning to use Time Machine on the off chance that the problem will be saved onto Time Machine. I'm wondering if the only way to save my photos and music is to export them to my external hard drive. Also, after I restore my laptop, when I return the photos and music, will they be grouped together in the appropriate folders, or will I have to manually do it? Is there a way to minimize the amount of work I have to do? Thanks, any advice would be extremely helpful!
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Transferring iPhoto and iTunes to external hard drive
- Thread starter kflee
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when i have swap macs i have always just dropped the files i want to an external hard drive and then dropped them back to the new mac with no problems, time machine is a great option and i have a 2tb timemachine AirPort Extreme capsule which everything backs up to if any of my drives fail. with your music iTunes will automatically organise your files once you import them. i normally choose not to copy the files which is quicker but personally pref. when moving iPhoto though you must move the iPhoto file and all the photo's associated with that iPhoto file as it will open properly but when you try to view the photo's individually it will ask you to locate the missing file.
hope it goes smoothly for you.
hope it goes smoothly for you.
To move your iTunes Library first don't just drag-and-drop and instead use iTunes itself described in the blog post How to move an iTunes library to an external drive.
To move and iPhoto Library follow the Apple document iPhoto '11: Move your iPhoto library to a new location.
To move and iPhoto Library follow the Apple document iPhoto '11: Move your iPhoto library to a new location.
