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Backing up itunes

madoka

madoka

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
I'm a new itunes user so please bear with me. When Apple released itunes 4, I decided it was finally time to try it out. So for the past two weeks I've been steadily feeding my CD collection into my G4. So far it's really, really cool. Now I don't have to worry about scratching, distintigrating, losing CDs, etc. But now I'm up to the letter E into my collection (I organize alphabetically) and already have 13 gigs with AAC. I know that I never want to rip this many CDs again and would love to put my CDs into storage. So I have the following questions:

1. Can I just move my itunes library folder to my second internal HD to make a backup of it?

2. If I were to get a Powerbook, can I just copy the itunes folder to it to have all the files?

3. I bought a couple dozen songs from the Apple Music Store. Will these act any different if I do either of the above?

4. My Superdrive is now acting a bit flaky. It makes a much louder noise when ripping CDs and will startup and stop multiple times while ripping a single CD. Has this occured to anyone else? Any suggestions on how to fix it? Man, I really should have done this while it was still under warranty! 🙂

Thanks!
 
Same here, I don't want to loose my itunes tracks, because of some corrupt installer or other similar disaster.

I simply duplicate my itunes folder to a FWHD on a regular basis.

I assume as long as I don't rename anything I can replace my original itunes folder if necessary.

At worst, I will corrupt the library files, but the mp3's or ACC's will be intact, I can simply drag them into an empty itunes if necessary.

I have a .mac account and can back up the library files to my idisk (music files take up too much disk space). I'm fairly sure .mac back up just duplicates these files to my idisk, so it should be just the same to an ext HD.

My question is, When will .mac back up, work with an ext HD.
 
Yes, just copy you iTunes folder to somewhere else. I changed my itunes folder to my music folder in my home directory to make finding it easier. If you change it, iTunes will move all the files for you. Under preferences/advanced. You can also burn the files to a cd or dvd as mp3s or aacs. That is definetely the way to go.
 
OK - maybe I should go off and RTFM (but it's always easier just to ask right?)

Does iTunes need everything under the same directory? I have 40G of mp3s (all my own CDs!) on a fileserver in my house (PC). When I import these into iTunes it copies them into the local directory. That's great - but if it keeps all the tunes locally, I'll end up filling up my PowerBook.

Is it possible to 'mount up' directories of mp3s when I'm connected to the network, and see them in iTunes, but not have them on my local disk?
 
Just open up your itunes prefs on your server, go sharing and choose the songs you want to share with your powerbook. (all of them if you want).

When you open itunes on your powerbook, there they are in your source window along with your library and playlists.

Good Eh!!!

You might have to disable your firewall or better still assign itunes a port number.
 
The server is a PC unfortunately - so it's not running iTunes.

I really want iTunes on my Mac to look at files on a disk share somewhere else.
 
yes, you can. All you need to do is set you iTunes directory of that on the server. Then, simply add the files and it will add them to your library but not copy them to your computer. preferences/advanced.

I have done that. You just need to make sure that you can see the directory, after that it is trivial to change the directory iTunes directory. It needs everything in one directory.
 
I don't allow iTunes to have so much control over my music, i have a folder on the desktop which i can quickly view without iTunes making a copy of the music for itself in the iTunes directory.

Anyway, if i want to backup my music i just drag my music folder from the desktop onto my iPod, that simple to do a backup. Same with CDR.
 
Thanks for the help folks.

I notice that iTunes is fairly open in the way it lays its directories out - ie top level with an XML directory file, and sub directories where the mp3s live.

If I feel energetic, I think I could probably do something funky with Perl and symlinks to map remote files under the iTunes directory. I'll release it for free if it's useful...
 
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