itunes backup suggestions

The Drobo suggestion is a great one, especially if you want constant backup without having to think about a backup schedule. The only downsides are the cost and that you have everything committed to one physical device that can be lost in a burglary or fire.

A simpler, cheaper way to do it is to plug another 1 TB drive into the Mini, either Firewire or USB, and use a backup application like SuperDuper to clone your primary drive on a regular schedule. You can buy a good quality external 1 TB drive from LaCie or Seagate for $100-120, back up every Saturday morning and likely never lose more than a week's worth of ripped files.

The advantage of having a separate physical drive is that you can keep it in a separate location when you're away from your system for awhile. As always, the choice comes down to which set of compromises you're most comfortable with.

SuperDuper is about as easy to use as an application gets. When you launch, it scans for any attached drives. You pick the source drive from a pull-down menu on the left side of the window and a destination drive from the pull-down on the right, click "Copy now," click a confirmation button and the copy starts. A status window opens showing you what's going on and when the copy is done.

The first time you copy a large drive it will take a long time, depending on the size, the speed of the drive and whether you're using USB or Firewire. After the initial full copy only changed or new files will be copied so it takes only a few minutes, depending on how much new music you've ripped.

After you've chosen a source and destination drive the first time, those will come up as the default when you open the application but you can change it if you want to copy a different drive, or copy to a different drive. There are some other options, like having the application repair disk permissions before you start, but the basic operation is extremely easy, and easy to understand.

One of the side benefits of the application is that you can create a bootable clone of the drive in your computer, either in a partition on one of your big drives or on another external drive. It's very reassuring to have an exact copy of your operating system, data and applications on an external drive and be able to boot any compatible computer even if your hard drive fails.

Jtwrace - Yes, you can back up any drive to any backup medium that has the capacity of the original. I use SuperDuper to back up an external drive with all the iTunes music and database on it, and also to clone the internal drive of the MacBook Pro so that I can boot from the clone if I ever need to.

If you're going to copy two different drives to one backup drive you'll need to partition the backup drive so that it appears to be two separate drives. You can do that with the Disk Utility application that comes with the Mac OS.

Before you start using the backup drive use Disk Utility to create two partitions on it, one the same size as the internal drive of the Mini and the other with all the remaining space.

For instance, if you have a 1 TB drive as your backup and your Mini has a 160 Gb internal drive, create one 160 Gb partition on the backup drive to use as a clone of the Mini's internal drive and another partition that uses all the remaining space on the 1 TB drive. Theoretically that will be 840 Gb but in reality it will be somewhat less than that.

When you start up the backup drive it will show up as two separate drives, one the same size as your Mini's internal drive where you can clone the operating system and a second where you can backup your iTunes drive.