How can I move my itunes movies from my iMac to my mac mini which is serving as a media server attached to HDTV?

Question

I want to move my itunes movies from my iMac to my Mac Mini, which is hooked up to my HDTV, so that I can save space on the iMac and use the direct source Mac Mini to view the iTunes movies that I purchase and download.  Can anyone give me ideas on how to do that?

Answer 1

iTunes does not have provision for automatically storing one kind of media on a separate drive, so you have some basic decisions to make first.  Do you want these movies to still appear in your iTunes library, or are you content with browsing filenames on a drive in Finder when you want to look for one?  The second's the easiest thing because then you don't have to have an external drive permanently turned on and attached to your computer (wired or wireless).  To do that you literelly only need to drag your movies folder to an archive drive and delete movies from iTunes.  To watch them again you can add it back to iTunes while holding down the option key so the movie is used from its location on the external drive.
There's ways to move the movies to an external drive while keeping them in iTunes but the external drive iwll always have to be turned on and connected to the computer or you will see a bunch of broken link exclamation marks.
Realize what you are talking about is not "backup".  Backup (which you should do) is putting a second or more copy of items on external drives for the day when your internal drive fails and everything on it is lost, inclduing all your home photos and perhaps things that have been pulled from the iTunes Store and can no longer be re-downloaded.