Laptop Life / Where to store your files

[davidwes]

Hi. I wanted to know how most people here deal with this issue.

I have a laptop and a large media library (run by itunes) and all the files are stored on an external harddrive. I feel this is probably pretty common to most people. So what do most people do when they are on the road?

Right now I just drag what I want for the day from the external onto my computer and then delete it afterwards.

 

[FJ218700]

I do the same thing

Until flash drives are affordable at >64 GB, I think we're stuck.

 

[davidwes]

I do the same thing

Until flash drives are affordable at >64 GB, I think we're stuck.

Do then use Itunes to play the music? On my itunes if I double click the file it now shows up twice on my library, so I have to delete that too at the end of the day.

Because of that I actually just keep my favorites full time on the internal one.

 

[FJ218700]

well, my laptop is in fact dedicated to the road. My desktops use aliasing in iTunes to pull up the files from an external drive. However, for my laptop, I have iTunes copy the files to my music library. the external on my desktops are networked, so I just open the laptop, pull up the networked external drives, and drag the files I want to iTunes on the Laptop. iTunes copies them, and when I'm done, I just delete them from the iTunes library and they are once again off my HD.

Like I said, eventaully I'll have hi-cap flash drives for all my media, and have ailiasing on all the time for all my iTunes accounts. Then just always plug and play. But this is a ways off.

 

[Sean Dempsey]

how much free space do you have on the laptop, and what kind is it?

I always had enough room on my laptop for my music, so I am not sure how I would do it if I didn't. Even if you just have 20 gigs free, that's ALOT of music.

 

[yippy]

I only have a 15Gig iTunes library so I can keep all of my music full time on my laptop (my laptop is my sole computer). My music I keep on an external drive and when I go on trips I just copy the ones I want over and delete them when I get back.

If you really have a lot of media or want to take everything with you, you might consider getting a portable firewire hard-drive. They are bases on laptop hard-drives so they are much smaller and most are bus powered so you can run them off of your laptop without an additional power adapter. They will decrease your battery life when plugged in but I don't know by how much.

 

[crazycat]

My itunes library is around 90GB, thats after deleting many many shows that i do not need. I have an external LaCie 160GB rugged portable hard drive, when i travel i transfer the whole itunes folder on there and just drag what i need. My main itunes library is on my macpro which has a 1TB hard drive and a 500GB external.

 

[FJ218700]

how much free space do you have on the laptop, and what kind is it?

I always had enough room on my laptop for my music, so I am not sure how I would do it if I didn't. Even if you just have 20 gigs free, that's ALOT of music.

PB 1.67 GHz with 100 GB HD,

two system partitions and a 60 GB shared partition for media

 

[byakuya]

I only have the applications and private files on my MB. That is like already almost 30GB of data. So I only keep some songs that are my current favorites on my MB and the rest on external storage. I always try to have 15 to 20 GB of my 80GB HD free.

byakuya