Moving iTunes to a Portable Hard Drive

Steps in Order

Preparation

1. Buy or otherwise obtain a Portable Hard Drive. Make sure it is large enough to hold your library. This one is bigger than the hard-drive in my computer!

*heh*
So I reckon it will work. Bought one of these at Micro Center yesterday. On SALE! Score!
Tosihiba Portable 160GB 5,400RPM USB Hard Drive

2. Set up the Drive to receive the files. I created a music folder on the drive.

3. As with any risky type of operation ~ Preparation is key ~ Backup your iTunes Library ~ First. I put mine on DVD-R's. These are whopping 4.7GB! Much larger than a CD-R.

Following this article from The Unofficial Apple Weblog ~tuaw.com, by Scott McNulty:
How To: Back up your music using iTunes 7

The backup took me about 40 - 45 minutes and used 4 DVD-R's. Relatively small library - but this will only get larger, I'm sure.

Now for the actual scary part:

Execution

Following the instructions from a lifehacker.com post: How to Move Your iTunes Library to an External Drive

1. Change your settings. First, in iTunes' Preferences panel, in the Advanced section, make sure "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" is checked, as well as "Keep iTunes Music folder organized." Then, in the "iTunes Music folder location" area, click on the Change... button, and enter the folder on your external drive you want to move your library to.

Hint: Store your music in a subdirectory of the destination. Like, if your new spot is D:\TOSHIBA EXT\Music\ iTunes\Tom\Library\, set your music folder to D:\Music\iTunes libraries\Tom\Library\.

2. Move the music. Let iTunes do it for you. From the Advanced menu in iTunes, choose "Consolidate Library." You'll get a prompt that looks like this:



Click "Consolidate". Once done, (depending on the size of your library) this could take a while to actually do. Probably safe to get up and walk away for awhile.

Note: This step originally took about an hour and a half to two hours for my mac to complete. We had a bleepin' power belch about 8/10 of the way through the copy process that took everything down for about half a second. *sigh* It finished rather quickly after that, but when I looked at the settings I had changed in iTunes they had reverted back to the original settings. Not willing to take the chance on screwing this up. I deleted everything on the portable and started over. *heavy sigh* Thorough I am...Dammit. As I put this edit in, iTunes is about 2/3 of the way through my library.


3. Move your internal iTunes Files. We are nearly finished now. The media files have been moved, now we need to move the internal database files for iTunes. This is where that handy music sub-directiry comes in. Copy the files iTunes Library, iTunes Music Library.xml and the folder, Album Artwork. Navigate to the folder above where the actual music files are. In my case: D:\TOSHIBA EXT\Music\ iTunes\Tom\



4. Point iTunes to the new library database file. There are now two copies of the library, one on your original drive, and one in the destination (portable) drive. iTunes needs to know where the new one is. If iTunes is running quit the application. Then launch iTunes, while holding down the Option key (Shift on a PC). When it starts it will ask you which library to use. Click "Choose Library" and browse to where the iTunes Library.itl on the external drive.



Now iTunes will use the new library location. Now I can delete the old folder and free up a bunch of space. In my case it should be 9 or 10 Gigs.

Old Drive icon
New Spacier Drive!

A gain of nearly 22 GB freed. Woo Hoo!



Now my iTunes library is portable(!) Bonus! The only real drawback for this is you have to have that drive connected in order to play music from iTunes...Not gonna be an issue for me...If I remember to hook it up!

To quote Gina Trapani @ Lifehacker:

"Using this method, you can plug in your external hard drive to another computer (PC if you've got iTunes on Windows, or another Mac if on the Mac) and as long as it gets assigned the same drive letter, you can access your full library, with play counts, playlists and other metadata intact from anywhere."

Good one Gina!

Back Up Strategy...Got One?

Or is it something you know you should do but just haven't gotten around to yet?

Serious subject *for a change*

Think about it...How much of yourself (and your life) is tangled up in computer(s)? Think about it.

How much of that would you be willing to live without if you had something catastrophic happen to your computer? Could you recover? Would you? And how much of a pain in the ass would it be?

I have been in this position before ~ More than once...How many of us have been working on a big Word doc or excel Spreadsheet (or whatever flavor of software you use) when the application locks up and you've lost it all?

Okay multiply that on a massive scale ~ And your hard drive gives up the ghost...What are your choices? Did you do regular backups? Or was it more of a "It cannot happen to me, my computer is inviolate"! before the crash.

Or more of an I know I need to do it ~ I'll get to it when I get to it. I have to admit ~ this was my strategy until I upgraded to OS 10.5. And even after that for a while. I started using Time Machine, the back up software that is bundled with OSX. It copies to an external drive the incremental changes that take place on my system every hour. But this is not a disk image of the machine. So it would be of some help, but certainly not the be all and end all.

To that end ~ A few months ago I purchased a Seagate FreeAgent™ desktop 320 GB USB Hard Drive. These work with both Macs and PCs and are relatively inexpensive. And it had been sitting around not doing much for a couple of months'

But what Software to couple with it? There are a lot of software solutions out there. OSX doesn't really come with a viable piece of SW for backup unless you are a .mac subscriber. (Which I declined to become) Maybe one day, but not right now.

I finally settled on Shirt Pocket's SuperDuper. Installed it last night and did a full backup *while I was sleeping*.

I can now have relative piece of mind knowing that my valuable stuff is backed up...And will continue to be...

And to that end, my next project will be moving my iTunes Library to a portable hard drive...

X-posted: TexasT's Invades LiveJournal

iPhone: TexasT's Bites the Bullet

While doing a couple of loads laundry tonight I started putting my thoughts about the iPhone together for a review.

So far the topics I’ve got are:
Okay I’ve got the damned thing ~ Now what?

• What’s in the Box?
• The exterior
• The Case Oooo Shiny Oooo scratchy
• The external buttons
        • Sleep / Wake
        • Volume
        • Silent / Ring
        • Home
• Recessed Head phone jack ~ WTF? What the hell were they thinking?
• Dock Connector
• Cases and Such ~ Protecting the Apple Brick Phone
• The Touch Screen Interface
• The Stock Applications
• Phone Functions
• Battery Life
• Internet
• Email
• iPod
• iTunes WiFi Music Store

Anything you want to see? Comment and let me know. I’ll answer if I can!

A Sad Tale of Technology Run Amok!

Some time after I got home from house sitting for the Luddites, Monday evening, I sat down at the computer to get on line. *thank the gods and godesses*

The Queen went up to bed. Around 9 PM or so I decided to listen to some music via iTunes.

Went looking for some "No Doubt"-age type stuff. Ah Gwen!

iTunes lets you play a little 30 second snippet of the song in question. A "try before you buy" situation. So I was trying to play some of these tunes before I made my purchase. I could hear music...Barely. It was just an undertone. Nothing coming out of my speakers at all. I kept fiddling with the volume which was turned almost all the way up any way ( as advised).

Of a sudden I hear The Queen yelling down the stairs, "Must you have the music blasting up in your BEDROOM! It is bad enough when you play it loud downstairs!"

*blink* Well Monday night aside ~ I had no idea she was averse to loud music. Didn't used to be...

Oops!

You see, I have a couple of these Airport Express doodads (technical term ~ heh) spaced around the house. These jewels are really handy.

One of the features is it lets you stream music to remote speakers from iTunes via your computer. I have one in the garage. And one in the ~ you guessed it ~ BEDROOM. Hooked up to the stereo up there.

~ AirPort Express works with both Mac's and PC's.
Other features include:
✓ Wireless printing
✓ Sharing an internet connection
✓ 802.11n wireless compatability
✓ Internet security
✓ Extension of your wireless network

But I digress...Apparently I had left the bedroom selected the last time I was listening to music up there and had also left the tuner on...Sooooo...It was most assuredly blasting away loud enough to wake Herself up. And when she is awakened rudely, she tends to not be in a good mood! As any one would. I muted fairly quickly and apologized profusely and explained I was trying to figure out was the hell was wrong down here...Kind of funny now...But of course The Queen is out of town...

Xposted @ TexasT’s Invades LiveJournal!

Carp!

I really need to make an attempt to update here more often.

More Apple and Mac Stuff soon.

iPhone

The camera...

Finally had to move the icon off the main screen. Apparently I kept hitting the icon either putting the phone in the holster, Or when taking it out.

At any rate, about half of the time when removing it from the holster, instead of seeing the startup screen, I’d see the camera screen.