iTunes starting to take up too much space??

Not so much running iTunes on a portable hard drive, but having your media stored on a portable hard drive and having iTunes linked to it. Yes. You can do that.

I would recommend you go out and get yourself the biggest hard drive you can afford and store your media on it. Just my opinion.

And if you are a little paranoid about hard drive crashes. Get two of them and save your media to both. One as the actual iTunes library and one as a back up.

I would recommend also getting the largest external drive, but get 2 of them, one for content, the other to back it up (once lost a drive with all my itunes content on it, lucky I was able to salvage the data back, which was worth $1000's).

copy you itunes over to the new drive then in itunes preference:advance change the location to the new drive, and it is all good.

still in school said:

What settings would I have to change in order for me to do that? Every time I drag and drop a media file into iTunes, it automatically makes a copy into it's own database but I have no idea where.

Click to expand...

There are plenty of tutorials on transferring your iTunes library from one hard drive to another and then setting it up within iTunes to see the new location. Do a quick search here and you will find some also.

A common mistake is to only copy the itunes music folder, make sure you copy the whole itunes folder with everything in it.

If your going through the hassle of moving everything over to an external I'd say go w/ a wireless share. You're working off a MBA so I'm guessing that you have another computer around the house someplace. Make a share off of it and use that for the storage space needed. If you need to make it mobile attach the external drive to the computer as well and back everything up to the external for the times you need to be mobile out of wireless reach. Why start locking a laptop down to a desk w/ extra USB devices!

I run FreeNAS on a desktop machine running in RAID 5. I have an external 1TB also connected as backup for the times I want/need to go mobile. I'm a little extreme I know but any basic share will work the same way!

You can even go really crazy and do multiple iTunes DB's for the times you want to take just enough music someplace that will fit on the MBA. If you can think of a better mobile solution I'm all ears! I've been dealing w/ iTunes, 300+ gigs of music, 1000's of movies, and 5 family members all wanting to use the same share and be able to sync their iPods for 2 years! If there is a better way I'd love to find it.....

It sounds like you have some googling ahead of you! Start w/ getting a wireless network setup. After you got that going look someplace like this for the iTunes sharing.