Am I duplicating all my copied music files?

I have a major computer malfunction that is requiring me to do a system recovery.
I copy all my CDs onto my computer and then into Itunes. I noticed today while backing everything up that the Itunes folder in My Music has about 4.5 MB and all the files I have in Itunes and copied to my computer and are located in a standalone folder?
I'm not that slick to be honest but I guess my simple question is: Should I just be copying right into Itunes. I find it wasteful if Itunes is duplicating files already on the computer when it should just really link the exsiting file to itunes?
Anyway, I stand to have about 9 mb when I guess I should have half, correct?

Look in Edit > Preferences > Advanced > General. Do you have "Copy files to..." checked? If so, and if you have been adding files somewhere on your PC and then add the songs to the iTunes library, it makes a second copy in the iTunes Music folder. And, your iTunes library links to the one in the iTunes music folder. At that point, you can delete the other one if you wish.

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    Message was edited by: polydorus

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