[Chief5959]

I have a lot of music stored on my IMAC in the Itunes. have given an external hard drive where I would like to have a copy of the music files as a back up in case anything happens to my system.
Does anyone know how to make a copy of the music and place that second copy in the external hard drive? Thanks.
I have a lot of shows on my itunes and I am really nervous about tampering with it.

[jck_strw]

chief

I'm not in front of a mac at the moment, but I seem to recall Macs store their music in a Music folder somewhere in the user's home directory. All the music should be in this folder somewhere (maybe in different folders for hte artists, etc.) Easiest way to find this is to open iTunes and select a song. Right click (or rather hit the apple key and click) and bring up the option, Show in Finder. Then, back up a couple of folders and you should see the "root" folder. Ctrl-C (copy) that bad boy and then ctrl-V (paste) it to your external HD.

Let me know if this doesn't make sense.

[Chief5959]

Thanks very much it worked like a charm. I owe you a pint somewhere down the road.

[myoung6923]

You could always just drag & drop whatever you want from one hard drive into the other & it will copy it over.

If your external hard drive is big enough you should definitely set up a backup routine for your files so that it just happens automatically. If it's big enough, I would definitely back up your entire home directory - which would include your documents, movies and music folders.

If you have a .mac account there's a lot of back up options that come with it including a backup program. If not, there are a lot of other backup programs that you can set up so that it automatically runs on a regular schedule.

I once lost my entire library of music - and you can't recover the songs that you purchased through itunes - you'd have to buy them again.

[Chief5959]

Thanks again for the help. I am noving along the lines of getting an automatic backup in addition to having something offsite so that if my flat is robbed my music will be safe.

[gr8fulbluz]

I have been thinking of the same thing for about a year!! I havenot backed up my purchases in any sort of organized way, like an Idiot that I am


But while thinking about it I found this>>>
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301748
I will prolly do something soon but I am trying saving for a new mac, but I really should get an external

cheers

[myoung6923]

Yeah - I use a program called Superduper which creates a bootable clone of my hard drive every night. If my main hard drive takes a dive I just boot up off my backup and then I can re-clone it back to the original hard drive - or a replacement if it's needed.

It's really the ultimate way to backup.