Setting up an external harddrive

[MrFunky]

Hey folks, bear with me, as I am not very computer savvy, and new to your community here. (also I apologize if this is posted in the wrong forum. this one seemed the most logical, but I wasn't sure.)

Just bought an external harddrive for my MacBook, and my hope was to move my itunes library, photos, and a few essential documents to the external.

what is the easiest way to do this?

Also, after I have everything backed up, I was planning on restoring the computer to factory settings, and enjoy it being "like new" with all my content on harddrive. If I did this, would I still be able to seamless access all the stuff on the external, such as my itunes library? How would this work? Is it even a good idea to restore the computer?

Thank you much in advance for any help, advice, and insight.

 

[BlueRevolution]

You can, but I'm not sure why you'd want to. "Like new" implies that all of your preferences and customization are gone. In order to have your files with you when you move about, you would need to bring your external hard drive with you everywhere.

You can move files and folders to the external drive by dragging them to the icon on the desktop while holding down the shift key. (If you don't hold shift, files will copy by default.) Moving the iTunes library is easy enough, but needs to be done from within iTunes. Once again, if you do move the library, you won't be able to access your tunes on the go.