2. pc-audio
  3. 1217423539

How Do I Point iTunes to use my backup ext drive?

I use iTunes on a Mac Mini with 2 external 500GB disk drives. I use one of the external disk drives strictly as a backup. All I do to backup my iTunes information is I copy the complete contents of the iTUNES folder on my primary drive to the backup drive by the drag & drop (copy) feature. As you Mac users know, the iTunes folder contains 4 sub folders with the Music Library, Album artwork and XML file.

Well the dreaded day has come and I suffered a hard disk crash. No problem as my backup disk contains all of my needed iTunes files. However when I try to access my playlists, iTunes tells me it can't find the song title. I can change the location of the song title to the backup drive and it finds it successfully, but with over 4,000 songs ripped I can't imagine that I have to do this for every song. I changed the Advanced Preferences in iTunes to point to the backup location, but I think this is only to tell iTunes where to rip new music.

How do I tell iTunes to reference the backup drive so that it can find my playlists and music files?

Thanks in advance,
Brian ...
cycles2

Showing 3 responses by jpod

jpod
59 posts
 
Onhwy61
Thank you. I'm kinda new to PC audio but not new to PCs. I was beginning to think that Itunes was a lot more complicated than it first seemed.

BTW, I'm using a Vista machine as a music player/server and am backing it up to a 3.5" hard drive. Should the internal HD in the player/server fail, I have several options including physically replacing the HD in the player/server with the HD in the backup drive.

JPO
jpod
59 posts
 
Since I'm planning to use drive imaging to just back up the whole drive what you suggest may not apply to me.

But I must say your solution to Cycles2's original problem seems very straight forward. (Of course we have yet to hear from Herman about this.)

But I must also say that I have done exactly what Onhw61y suggested and have successfully accessed data (but not Itunes data) on an external drive, with no difficulties whatsoever. And I would be tempted to try it again if I were attempting to access only my backup Itunes and not using third party backup software to restore the whole drive.

Is there something particular to Itunes that would make this a bad ideah?

JPO
jpod
59 posts
 
Sorry, I didn't address my post to Rel but meant to.
JPO
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