Need to sync my wife's phone to my computer without losing my iDevices or her data

[imahawki]

OK, here's my situation. My family has a lot of iOS devices. We have 4 iPads, two iPhones, and 1 iPod touch as well as 4 Apple TVs. Currently, my iPhone and iPad, my kids iPads, and the touch are all synching to my iMac which has the main iTunes library (several hundred albums and 900 movies, e.g. ALL of the content we own). My wife has been synching her iPhone 4 to her laptop for a couple years and wants to start synching with my iTunes library to centralize everything to one master library because she only has SOME of the content on her Macbook.

How do we do this without her having to set up her iPhone from scratch and without wiping out everything I've got for my iDevices? Also, I want this all done under one instance of iTunes and one login in my iMac, not separate accounts.

I can't copy my wife's iTunes library file over because then I'll lose the ability to sync the 5 devices I'm already synching. All the articles I find seem to be geared towards having one device and changing from an old PC to a new PC.

Once this is done she isn't going to be attempting to synch to two computers, she will permanently be synching with mine.

 

[imahawki]

Anyone?

 

[CosmoPilot]

If I understand correctly, she wants to abandon her iTunes library and use yours?

If this is the case, as soon as she tries to sync to your library, she's going to get a message from iTunes that says, "this iPhone is currently synced with a different iTunes library, are you sure you want to sync to this new library, if so, all your previous data will be erased and replaced." Or something to that effect. Rest assured, only the iTunes content you are syncing will be erased. If you don't select contacts, mail, etc., that stuff will stay on your wife's phone. If you select to sync music, apps, movies, etc., all that data will be wiped from you wife's phone and replaced with the content from your computer.

My question, is why does your family need to sync to your computer anyways for music and apps?

With iCloud, and iTunes Match all your data is stored in the Cloud. We stopped syncing devices (except for photos and movies) when iCloud went live (My family has 4 iPhones, 2 iPads, 2 AppleTVs, 1 iTouch, and 3 Macs). All your songs, apps, TV shows, movies, books are in the Cloud for all your iOS devices to download. You can have 10 devices for iTunes Match...why not just go this route and then only sync devices to the computer to transfer movies and photos (larger files). If you have the WiFi bandwidth, you can even download movies from the cloud without syncing to the computer.