I purchase much of my music through iTunes and have amassed quite a collection.
After each purchase, the iTunes software asks me if I want to "back-up’ my purchase by writing it to a blank CD, I always decline.
I don’t feel like having 500+ CD’s as a way to back it up, but a thought occurred to me, and nobody seems to know:
My PC has a built-in Blu-Ray Disc burner, what if I went into iTunes,
File->Library->Burn to Disc
Would this let me back-up my entire iTunes library to a blank Blu-Ray Disc?
Has anyone ever done this?
Or would there be an easier way?
What if I bought one of those small external drives, could I just transfer my iTunes music collection there, and then reload them into iTunes if I ever had to install windows again (without any problems?)
This stuff is stressing me out. The only reason I bought an iPod is so at least I have my music backed up on the iPod.
I don’t know if it’s the best way but I copy my entire iTunes folder to an external drive. That way I back up the XML files and everything. Actually, I’m so paranoid and storage is so cheap that I keep two backups but I know that’s overkill.
Your iTunes folder contains the database files with your playlists and everything else. Under that there is iTunes Music folder, then under that depends on how you have it organized. Usually it is;
iTunes > iTunes Music > (Artist) > (Album) > (Songs)
Copying over the entire iTunes folder allows you to simply move the entire thing back should anything happen to it, or copy it over to a different computer should you purchase one or the old one crash.
So on my Windows Vista PC, the file I want to transfer to an external drive is
Start->Music–> iTunes? I just simply transfer this file to the drive?
(I’m still lousy at computers so I don’t know the difference between a file and folder)
I am intrigued by this. Are you saying that you have over 350G of music files that you’ve downloaded from iTunes? That is tens of thousands of songs. Let’s say 5,000 hours of music. Did I figure that right?
When I was doing Applecare support, I spoke to a handful of people with that kind of tune-age.
One guy had close to a terabyte of music that he wanted help backing up onto another one tb drive that he was then going to put into a safe deposit box.
My apologies if I stated it incorrectly, but each time I purchase a CD from iTunes, it always gives me the option of inserting a blank CD and backing up my purchase onto a CD.
So this is how I came to the one CD per album for back-up.
I just checked my iTunes and I have 352 albums, 4,263 items, or 26.39GB
So after each purchase I can insert a blank CD and back it up like that, it’s still an awful lot of CD’s to have as a back-up, and I’m thinking there has to be a much easier way.
I would say that of the 352 albums, 150 I probably imported from CD which I actually own, and the remaining 200 I purchased from iTunes.
At $10 a pop x 200 it still comes to a good chunk of change that I really don’t want to lose in case my computer loses everything.
For the time being the only means of back-up I have is everything is also on my 32GB iPod Touch.
I plan on upgrading to Windows 7, and I’m trying to figure this out so I don’t lose all the music I paid for.
No, that is simply the start menu navigation to open iTunes. You want to copy the actual folder within the computer’s directory. I do not have Vista so I do not know where it would be located on that OS. I use XP and my library is on an external drive so not sure what the default directory location is there anymore either.