Saving files to an external drive

[bertrand]

My wife just got a 160 GB portable hard drive. The goal is to back up our PC, but especially my iTunes files.

So my question is: for those of you who backed up your iTunes stuff to an external drive, is there something special to do or just copy the files like normal files? In case you need to move them from the external drive to the hard drive on the PC, is this also just a standard copy? Do I need to install iTunes on the external drive?

Thanks,

Bertrand.

[mjzee]

Basically, these are just normal files. Assuming you use iTunes to rip the music from your CD's (or download tracks from Apple), locate the folder to where iTunes copies the files. Then, using Windows Explorer (assuming you use Windows), navigate to that folder, and just copy and paste it to your new EHD. You don't need to install iTunes on the EHD. Make sure that iTunes doesn't "find" those backup files, because then two of everything will show in iTunes. If the EHD came with backup software, you can then instruct it to automatically backup your new iTunes tracks as you add them.

[bertrand]

Thanks - I was able to back-up my iTunes files.

A couple of weird things:

1) Some album titles I had changed (e.g. Mosaic boxed which I renamed to the original LP titles) were copied over with the old name. A friend told me you have to pick an option in 'preferences' to make the changes permanent, so to speak. I don't know if it's retroactive or not. I'll find out at the next back-up.

2) Some CDs I thought I had deleted from iTunes to make space were still there when I copied them over.

Now there is a 160GB iPod out there! My hard drive is not nearly big enough. Assuming I can get 160GB of music copied from my CDs (I doubt my collection is even that big based on some rough calculations), will people be running iTunes from EHDs, or will we have to get big-ass hard drives?

Will I even live that long to find time to download 160GB? I haven't even replaced my 40GB iPod since it broke last year. I kept waiting for a bigger model. I think 160GB is the most I'll ever need Right now, I'm having enough fun making playlists. My new car has an iPod jack, so I'm ready.

Bertrand.

[rostasi]

Now there is a 160GB iPod out there! My hard drive is not nearly big enough. Assuming I can get 160GB of music copied from my CDs (I doubt my collection is even that big based on some rough calculations), will people be running iTunes from EHDs, or will we have to get big-ass hard drives?

Will I even live that long to find time to download 160GB? I haven't even replaced my 40GB iPod since it broke last year. I kept waiting for a bigger model. I think 160GB is the most I'll ever need Right now, I'm having enough fun making playlists. My new car has an iPod jack, so I'm ready.

Bertrand.

Bertrand (and other's who may be interested),

To give you some idea about quantity,

I created a random 160GB "smart-playlist" with the stipulation that the

songs must be between 3 and 20 minutes (as an example of possibly your CD selections)

and it came up with a playlist that shows:

16274 items...65d:05h:27m:41s total time...160GB size

You could safely estimate 8 - 10 songs per disc average which would put this around 1600-2000 discs.

BTW: this comes out to ca. 227 kbps/song which is a comfortably high rate.

Edited September 9, 2007 by rostasi

[John L]

Thanks - I was able to back-up my iTunes files.

A couple of weird things:

1) Some album titles I had changed (e.g. Mosaic boxed which I renamed to the original LP titles) were copied over with the old name. A friend told me you have to pick an option in 'preferences' to make the changes permanent, so to speak. I don't know if it's retroactive or not. I'll find out at the next back-up.

2) Some CDs I thought I had deleted from iTunes to make space were still there when I copied them over.

There is actually some sort of bug in iTunes that causes this to happen sometimes. What you should do is choose the option in preferences for iTunes to "organize" your collection. That will automatically change the names of the iTunes folders and files every time that you edit information. Nevertheless, when I hook up a new hard drive, there are always a few (although not many) bugs of this type, such as old preedited names of files coming back (usually without any MP3s behind them). Sometimes, new names are dropped in favor of old, and then iTunes can't find the MP3 files with the new names (created by iTunes itself during the editing process!). Then you have to delete the items from your library and and reload them again.

On the other hand, if you had a lot of errors of this type, you probably did something to cause iTunes to create an entirely new iTunes library file on the basis of your folders (which may have not been edited along with your library). When you hook up to an external drive, you can keep your current iTunes library by simply going to preferences-advanced, choosing the option of copying all files to default iTunes folder and then changing the default folder to the external hard drive. On the other hand, if you are just using your external drive as a back up and want to keep using the hard drive of your computer as a default, I would just copy your iTunes music folders and ITunes library file to the external drive and leave it at that. Why even force iTunes to recognize those folders until you actually need them?

Now there is a 160GB iPod out there! My hard drive is not nearly big enough. Assuming I can get 160GB of music copied from my CDs (I doubt my collection is even that big based on some rough calculations), will people be running iTunes from EHDs, or will we have to get big-ass hard drives?

Will I even live that long to find time to download 160GB? I haven't even replaced my 40GB iPod since it broke last year. I kept waiting for a bigger model. I think 160GB is the most I'll ever need Right now, I'm having enough fun making playlists. My new car has an iPod jack, so I'm ready.

No problem. I am up to 420 GB. I have a couple 500 GB external drives, but I am going to have to get bigger ones. It does take time to rip, but I got my night owl son to help me out. The real pain is having to edit out all of the CODB database errors.

I sometimes keep a subset of new music that I want to rotate into my iPods on my computer's hard drive. That eliminates the necessity of always having to fire up the external drive, which will wear out with time. When the external drive is not hooked up, iTunes automatically shifts the default drive back temporarily to the computer's hard drive, which is nice.

I did all this, by the way, not because I am compulsive about having a huge MP3 library, but because I have been living away from my CD collection for the last 3 years, and will continue to do so for 3 more. The age of portable large music collections is great!

Edited September 10, 2007 by John L