iTunes, iTunes Match, iCloud Storage Advice

[fretlessthumb]

Hi everyone,

I'm really hoping for some advice for some music dinosaurs…

My husband and I both use the same iTunes account. We have a large CD collection (700+ albums), and a small number of digital purchases. We currently run iTunes from our mac, with the music library stored on a NAS drive (as we're really mindful of clogging up the mac), and listening both through the mac, and our iPhones. The NAS does slow things down considerably, and we're always left with this annoying situation of having to periodically re-point iTunes to the NAS as the location of our music.

As an aside, we've been looking at signing up for iCloud storage for backup purposes, and this got us into thinking about whether there might be something different we could do for our music. This led to us researching iTunes Match etc and we're a little confused..

1 - could we backup our iTunes music library in iCloud storage so that we could restore the library should our NAS fail?

2 - If we were to also sign up to iTunes match, would it be a solution that would allow us to eliminate the NAS from our iTunes setup, apart from the purpose of having a local backup..so, at the moment, if we open iTunes when the NAS isn't connected, it defaults the library back to our internal hard drive, and then it takes ages to reset. I don't think we'd be able to get away from that in that we'd have to keep our iTunes library location as the NAS, so that we could carry on importing CDs and therefore wouldn't get around this problem, but if anyone knows better, or can recommend an alternative setup, that'd be great!

Thanks,

 

[Rigby]

1 - could we backup our iTunes music library in iCloud storage so that we could restore the library should our NAS fail?

You could of course store the music files on iCloud Drive. A potential problem is that iCloud Drive is not a pure online storage, but a sync service, and it does not support selective sync. This means that copies of all files will also live on the computer that you use to connect to iCloud Drive, which is probably not what you want.

Depending on what kind of NAS you have, you can check if it supports cloud backup to other providers than Apple. For example, QNAP has a "Cloud Drive Sync" app that allows syncing with Dropbox, MS Onedrive, and Google Drive. They are also working on adding more cloud services to the regular Backup app. Onedrive even allows you to stream the music that you have copied to the cloud using the Groove Music app (provided that you copy it to the right folder).

2 - If we were to also sign up to iTunes match, would it be a solution that would allow us to eliminate the NAS from our iTunes setup, apart from the purpose of having a local backup..

In principle yes. Once you have matched/uploaded your local library to the iCloud library, you can stream or download the music on any iOS device or computer running iTunes, and you do not necessarily need to maintain an iTunes instance with the local library.

Keep in mind though that iTunes Match does not replace a backup solution since it doesn't maintain your original files in the cloud if it finds a match to your song in Apple's library. So if there is a matching error (which can happen in rare cases) you could lose songs.