Backed up itunes to a hard drive, now we cant play any of our music unless harddrive plugged in. And we cant drag any music onto devices! Please help, thanks.

Hi there
Our desktop computer was painfully slow so backed up everything to hard drive (as 1 file) and did factory restore to computer. We have managed to get our photos and documents back to our pc but have struggled with itunes. We now have all our music there in our library but can not play any of it unless the hard drive is plugged in (says cannot locate the file when not plugged in). I manually consolidated files for one album which now means it will play without hard drive but I can't drag that to our iphones & ipods. Please help! Thanks.

*Also...is there any way I can filter out all the tracks with the ! so I can delete the unplaying copies as they're taking up room in my iTunes? I know how to find duplicates, but then I have to go and delete each one individually...*
*Thank you!*

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Backed up ITunes to external hard drive, now what?

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Quit iTunes.
Copy the entire /My Documents/My Music/iTunes folder from the C: drive to the external drive.
Start iTunes and immediately press and hold Shift.
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Look at these links. May be some assistance.
Windows - Change iPad default backup location
http://apple-ipad-tablet-help.blogspot.com/2010/07/change-ipad-default-backup-lo cation.html
Windows - Changing IPhone and iPad backup location
http://goodstuff2share.wordpress.com/2011/05/22/changing-iphone-and-ipad-backup- location/
 Cheers, Tom

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http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1449
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Assuming that is correct, and now I want to back the library up on DVDs, do I need a DVD burner to do so?
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Thanks, Nick.
Well, it's there, I didn't glue it back because I didn't know what sort of glue to use and I figure this region gets really hot, so it shouldn't be just any kind of glue. I just slid the hd in with it, it's as good as glued.
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Message was edited by: Spiceee

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Hi, BreezerSB2.
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Hi, BreezerSB2.
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Instead of using ITunes - which doesn't seem to be designed for people with laptops... - use your own machine's back up, or copy function.
Basically copy the Itunes music folder onto the external.
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Manual, boring, but better than anything Apple have designed for this fairly common scenario...

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Hello friends :
My iTunes music library is getting rather large and I feel it's time to "properly" back it up to an external hard drive.
I understand that you can back up your iTunes music folder to an external hard drive by the simple old "click and drag" approach using Windows Explorer.
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in iTunes, just hilight the "Music" playlist at the top of the sidebar and drag?
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Question about backing up iTunes library to hard drive

So I was looking at getting a MacBook Pro, and was going to buy an external hard drive (WD My Passport for Mac) to transfer the files to the new computer. I was wondering if my movie / digital copies will go to the external hard drive as well as music & everything. Also how would I go about doing the transfer, I'm sure it will be pretty easy to figure out just want to make sure everything goes to the new computer.
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launching iTunes on the MBP should then take you to the exact same library you were used to on the old machine.
JGG

Backed up itunes to a hard drive, now we cant play any of our music unless harddrive plugged in. And we cant drag any music onto devices! Please help, thanks.

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