OK, so my external hard drive is out of space. It is filled to the brim with … photographs. Now what do I do?
The old hard drive uses Firewire to plug into my Mac. But I understand Firewire is on the way out for Macs? So I have to buy a USB hard Drive? Then pass all the files through the computer to the new larger hard drive?
Does that sound about right?
Any advice?
Yes, that’s right.
You might want to buy a drive that has FW, USB and eSATA. FW 800 should be around on high-end Macs for a while, but FW has already been dropped from “consumer” laptops.
Oh, and if you are handy (and have a spare FW interface), you can just get a new, bigger drive and install it in your existing enclosure.
You can always archive your infrequently-accessed stuff to an on-line storage service, like ADrive.com, XDrive.com, or any of dozens of others. There are lots of them out there, and most offer a free service and a paid service.
Let me go to the shop and see what they got.
“There is no way I will ever fill a Terabyte.” (But we have all said that before.)
That’s right. (I have about 6 terabytes of external hard disk space, on about 8 drives – which aren’t all plugged in simultaneously; – I have a big collection of anime episodes).
Buy two, not one, and make one the backup of the other.
I was going to pose a similar question. I now have about 70 gb of TV shows from Itunes taking up hard disc space and I’m essentially unable to purchase any more TV shows.
I use a SimpleTech USB external storage device for daily backups of my complete hard drive.
But what if I just want to put my Itunes TV shows and movies on an external drive? Can I split up my Itunes files like that? Keep the music on the internal hard drive and the TV shows on the external? And then how would I sync my Ipod? My current external storage unit takes up both USB ports, so I can’t hook up my Ipod at the same time.
Any ideas?
FireWire’s not dead, it’s just… resting. Otherwise, Apple would not have added FireWire 800 to the Mac mini of all choices. That move makes me think that they will bring it back to the MacBook in the next revision (and I probably just jinxed it). Of course, it couldn’t hurt to get a drive with dual FW/USB ports.
You can keep your songs and TV shows pretty much where ever you like. Storing your music on the internal drive and TV shows and movies on an external drive is fine, so long as iTunes knows where to look for the files and that’s just a matter of dragging and dropping them into the library window. So long as iTunes knows where the files live, the iPod should sync ok as well.
But I don’t understand how your one external USB drive takes up two USB ports on your computer? Shouldn’t it just take one port?
So how do I split them up?
I don’t know what it should take, but it takes two.
Only because of power requirements. If you used an external power supply, you would only need one port.
To split them up- it sounds like you want to move the TV shows to the external drive. If these are TV shows bought from the iTunes store, the easiest way I can think of at the moment would be to copy the entire “TV Shows” folder to the external drive. This folder lives at User/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/TV Shows. Once you are sure they have all been successfully copied, you would want to delete their listings in the library window of iTunes so that when you re-add them from the external drive, you won’t have duplicate listings. Then re-add them by dropping the new TV Shows folder into the library window of iTunes. Make sure not to delete the original files until you are absolutely sure this new set up works.
As for your USB ports situation, if the drive is one of those portable drives, then yes, the only way to make room for the iPod in there is to use the external power supply which hopefully came with the drive and you still have. It sucks that SimpleTech decided the answer was to take up 2 of your USB ports. There are other portable drives that use only one connector for both power and data. You might want to get a powered USB multi-port hub. This will allow you to connect both the drive and the iPod at the same time.
It looks like it has an A/C jack, but it didn’t come with a power cord. Ah, well. If I’m using this as the backup, I should get a different external storage device for my television shows anyway.
Thanks for the tips.
Why people hoard stuff on their hard drives is beyond me, but you have many options:
Because uploading hundreds of gigabytes of data to an online service is not the ultimate answer. It has its own set of issues.
jpeg photos don’t compress much into zip or rar files.
It is simple hoarding. I spend my time cataloguing and labeling these files for no good reason at all.
Heck, I just noted I have 404 obituaries in my Obit collection.
I think you can do it with these steps:
[ul]
[li]Move the video files to the external drive[/li][li]Delete the (now invalid) entries for those files the iTunes library[/li][li]Disable the iTunes’ “Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library” option[/li][li]Add the files back to iTunes.[/li][/ul]
I don’t think I’ve tried it with video files though, experiment at your own risk…
I agree that it’s good to get a drive with multiple connections - FW & USB if you are running out of space to plug things in on your mac.
It’s better to get a larger drive than try to split up libraries, but if you must and still want it to be part of your library, you can copy of of your larger iTunes subfolders, say TV Shows, to the alternate drive and then replace the original with an Alias.
How do I get a larger internal drive for my Macbook?
Okay, you officially have a Problem. And I’m typing this in a roomful of librarians.
You just buy one.
Any 2.5" SATA drive will work. It’s a 5-minute job to install (stopping for coffee in the middle). You need a tiny Philips screwdriver. Transferring your data is a different story - you need some type of SATA interface to connect one of the drives while you copy everything. Disk Utility can make a perfect, bootable duplicate for you.