How do I back up my itunes and music library to an ext hard drive?

i need to do a system recovery and don't know what to do?

Backup iTunes to an External Drive
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1751

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How can I back up only iTunes and iPhoto to an external HDD

How can I back up only iTunes and iPhoto, so I can reformat my computer and restore the files in these two programs? I have an external, but its not big enough to create a time machine copy of my HDD. I have an iMac running OS X Yosemite 10.10.1. I am also running Windows 8 via Parallels and I would prefer to keep this partition in tact, but if thats not possible I'll re instal that program.
Some how Mackeeper and a couple other shady programs have been installed on my computer and what I want to do is reformat my computer.

You could drag the iPhoto and iTunes folders to the external drive and move them back later.
However, it might be easier to just remove MacKeeper and other adware.
See the post by John Galt in this thread about removing MacKeeper.
Apple Support help for removing adware can be found here: Remove unwanted adware that displays pop-up ads and graphics on your Mac - Apple Support

I have iTunes on my iPad. I have a new iPod nano. How do I connect iPod to iPad to download iTunes and music library?

I have iTunes on my iPad. I have a new iPod nano. How do I connect iPod to iPad to download iTunes and music library?

Hi Divine Inspiration,
You wouldn't connect the iPod to the iPad for data transfers. Music is stored and shared either through a computer or iCloud.
This article gives an overview of moving music and data off the iPad.
iTunes: Transferring media from your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or iPod
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1209
and this article explains syncing to the iPod.
iTunes: Syncing media content to iPod
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1351
Thank you for thinking of Apple Support Communities for your support needs.
Nubz

I need to sync my iPhone to new user id on the same mac. How do I keep my iPhone contacts and music library? I tried to sync and iTunes wanted to erase both.

I need to sync my iPhone to new user id on the same mac. How do I keep my iPhone contacts and music library? I tried to sync and iTunes wanted to erase both.

When you say a new user ID, are you referring to your Apple ID that you use to make purchases in the iTunes Store, etc? Or are you talking about a new user account on the same Mac?
iTunes alternatives
http://www.wideanglesoftware.com/touchcopy/index.php
http://www.ecamm.com/mac/phoneview/
http://www.copytrans.net/

I rented a movie on iTunes and it now has filled my hard drive and I can't get it off. Something is wrong and I need a solution before I try to reinstall the Mac OS to reformat

I rented a movie on iTunes and it now has filled my hard drive and has taken up all my harddrive space.....How can I remove the after math of the rented movie and fix this problem..? Oddly enough it does show the startup drive is not full.

In iTunes select the movie and hit Delete. Follow the prompts and then empty the trash.

Moving iTunes and music library from one computer to another

I need to move my iTunes and music library with purchased music, playlists, ratings, and legally downloaded music to another computer. How do I do that?

Try posting in the iTunes for Windows area. You'll be more likely to get a quick and accurate answer there than you will here in the iTunes for Macintosh forum. Good luck.

After moving my iTunes and iPhoto libraries to an external hard drive and deleting the originals i found i still had no space on my mac.help

i moved my itunes and iphoto libraries to an external hard drive to free up space on my mac.
after i had moved them and checked they could be found i trashed the originals and checked again that the could be found on the external hdd.
all seemed to be ok.
when i checked the disc utility it did not show i has made any more free space than i had before.
any help please as i am loving tje mac but i am still quite new to it.

Did you empty Trash?

How to make iTunes recognize the music library in my external hard drive after instaIling Yosemite?

How to make iTunes recognize the music library in my external hard drive after instaIling Yosemite? I tried re-setting the media folder location, but it didn't work. What else should I do?

The issue is not related to the external drive. iTunes Match has difficulties matching tracks ripped fom CDs because they may differ slightly from the versions on sale in iTunes. You can try the match again. Otherwise do a search of this forum. There are already many discussions on this subject here that may help you.

Transfering iTunes and music library to another computer

Hello,
I just got a new computer and I want to transfer my iTunes and music library to it. I would normally just transfer the files to the new computer, install iTunes, and rebuild my library, but there are two things: 1) I don't want to lose my playlists and 2) I have purchased music from the iTunes Music Store and I'm not sure it will play if I do it like that.
I have a feeling it has to do with deauthorizing the old computer.
Can anyone help?
Thanks in advance.

Welcome, Fred, to the Apple Discussions!
Here's a post on transferring your Music Library from one computer to another:
Hudgie, "Migrating iTunes for Windows to a new PC", 04:11pm Jun 9, 2005 CDT
You will definitely have to authorize your new computer. And if you won't be using the old one to play purchased songs any more, you should de-authorize it. Have a look at:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93014

Can I or how can I move my "Project Library" and "Event Library" to an external hard drive and work from there?

I am running low on hard drive space and would like to move my imovie "Project Library" and "Event Library" to an external hard drive. I cannot figure out how to find these libraries on my hard drive to move them. How do I tell iMovie to look to the external hard drive to find them?

You need to do all moves from within iMovie so you do not break the links between your projects and your events.
First you need an external drvie that is formatted as Mac OS Extended (journaled). FAT32 drives will not work, but can be reformatted using Disk Utility.
In iMovie, click VIEW/EVENTS BY DISK.
In the Project Library you should see all properly formatted disks as well as your current projects. Hold down the Command Key as you drag the small icon for the project to the small icon for the external drive in the Project Library List. Repeat for all projects.
Now do the same for the Events. Command-Drag the small icon for the Event to the small icon for the external drive in the Event Library List.
Note: If you drag, rather than Command-Drag, you will Copy rather than Move.

How can I consolidate my music library with an external hard drive?

I have moved my entire music library onto an external hard drive. However, when I want to copy a new CD at work, I often copy the music onto my laptop then have to manually transfer it to the external hard drive at home.
I thought that "consolidate" library would do this automatically for me. The problem is when I disconnect the external, the next time I open iTunes it tells me "The folder containing the iTunes Library cannot be found and is required. Please choose or create a new iTunes Library." So I choose the iTunes library that resides on my laptop in the Music folder. When I go back to using my external music folder and try to consolidate my library nothing happens. I would like to use the "consolidate library" command to copy the music from my laptop to my external hard drive. Please help!

Drag it to the internal drive.
If it contains the iTunes database files, launch iTunes with the Shift key held down, click on Choose Library, and navigate to it.
If it doesn't, drag it from there into the open iTunes application window.
(108123)

I am considering purchasing a new Mac desktop. I have, at present, a Liteon 851S ext CD/DVD write and a Maxtor 3200 USB ext hard drive. Will these work with a Mac desktop? My local Apple store could not answer my question.Happy New year to all.

I am considering purchasing a new Mac desktop. I have, at present, a Liteon 851S ext CD/DVD write and a Maxtor 3200 USB ext hard drive. Will these work with a Mac desktop? My local Apple store could not answer my question.Happy New year to all.

Yes the Mac can read that drive but you would need to Copy the data off of it to the Mac as apposed to Move, which implies Deleting them from the drive as they were transferred from the external to the Mac. Since the Mac can Not Write to NTFS drives it can't Delete anything as that is really a Write operation, IE Making changes to the NTFS formatted drive.
Once you have that Data on Both your New Mac and you Older Windows PC you can format that drive to work on both system.
If you want to and plan on doing that post back and I'll explane how, it is simple but should be done on a Windows PC.
If you only plan on using it on the Mac from now on that is fairly simple also and is done on the Mac, Once you have the files from it stored on the Mac.
Yes you could burn those photos to DVD but that is just a waste of DVDs, you don't need to.

Moved iTunes library to an ext hard drive to make space on my int drive... Followed steps from apple. Now I cannot access my music... It says: "File could not be used because the original file cannot be found. Would you like to locate it?"

Moved iTunes library to an ext hard drive to make space on my int drive... Followed steps from apple. Now I cannot access my music... It says: "File could not be used because the original file cannot be found. Would you like to locate it?"
I moved my iTunes library to my external hard drive some time ago and I followed the directions listed here on the apple support page. It did copy my library and now is on my hard drive... I can open iTunes and use it to sync all of my devices but I would like to play my music... I can see all of my music files but can not play them if I click on an album or song it says the following: "(file name) could not be used because the original file cannot be found. Would you like to locate it?" I click locate but do not know where to go from there? I need a way to access all files and not to hunt down one at a time on my hard drive... I am pretty sure I deleted the original library to make space on my internal drive which was the reason for moving it. I have tried and tried to fix it and do not have a lot of time to do so with a one and two year old at my house who do not like it whenI sit down at my computer. What to do??? Any help is much appreciated!!!

See Make a split library portable. Move all of the bits of the library together in the the correct shape and it should work. Or undo exactly what you did and then start over.
If you're a former Windows user don't try merging two folders together that have the same name by dropping one into the same folders as the other, as that goes badly on a Mac.
tt2

Why won't itunes find my library on my external hard drive? All that shows up are the purchased songs in the cloud?

Why won't itunes find my library on my external hard drive? All it shows are my purchased songs in the cloud.

See also this migrate iTunes library post or Recover your iTunes library from your iPod or iOS device.
tt2

Erasing all music from iTunes and starting over from an external hard drive

Hello,
I tried moving all my media to an external hard drive to make room on my MacBook Pro and just be able to run the media (ie music movies etc) from the external hard drive when it was connected.
Well this backfired big time probably because I did not follow any sort of instructions.
1st I backed up Finder > music > iTunes > iTunesMedia folder to two seperate external hard drives just in case.
2nd I think (this was back in March 2013) I decided to cut/delete the folder Automatically Add to iTunes and moved it to one of my external hard drives (this folder for some reason contained mostly everythiing that was in the iTunes Media folder).
3rd I finally decided to erase content from iTunes Media Folder
4th I deleted the iTunes Media folder because I felt it was stupid to have a "iTunes Media folder" and "iTunes Music Folder" in the same place but not actually have anything in the iTunes Music folder (probably really stupid of me in retrospect)
5th I unchecked the box under iTunes > Preferences > Advanced "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library"
6th I believe I changed the location of "iTunes Media folder location" in the Advanced area under Preferences thinking this should be pointing to my external drive
I then believe I tried to run iTunes and play my content, but when I did all it did was copy my music/media back to my MacBook Pro hard drive but I did not realize it was doing this until later the next day when I tried to play some music and realized I had 3 copies of everything in my iTunes program (ie music movies podcasts tv shows etc) however, I could play all three versions of whatever it was I selected there was no "error message" saying that iTunes could not located that file, would you like to try and locate.
So I checked Finder to see if there were 3 copies of everything (by the way at this point I stopped connecting my external hard drive for the sake of making more copies on iTunes) but there wasn't??? So I tried to go through Option+View > Show Exact Duplicate Copies and delete all but one of the items. When I would delete them and it asked if I wanted to move them to my Trash Bin I clicked yes and all the 2nd and 3rd copies were gone!!! Yeah, so when I played those songs/movies that remained they would play!!!!!
Than I realized that my Internal Hard Drive was almost full and went looking around for things I could delete to help make my MacBook run better, and realized that my Trash had a large amount of data in it and that emptying it would significantly reduce space on my Internal Hard Drive, but when I went back to iTunes and selected music or movies to play it placed the infamous "!" next to that track or movie and it could not locate those items anymore?
Long long long story short hopefully, can anyone help me set up iTunes so that it only can play content/media off of my external drive and not take up space on my internal hard drive? Is this even possible to do that or will always start to copy those files from the external hard drive back onto the internal hard drive? and second is there anyway to use the Apple router external hard drive to use as the source for all my media?
PS I am running Mac OS X Lion version 10.7.5 and iTunes 11.1.3 (8) 64-bit

2012EVOL wrote:
Hello,
I tried moving all my media to an external hard drive to make room on my MacBook Pro and just be able to run the media (ie music movies etc) from the external hard drive when it was connected.
Quit iTunes.
Copy the entire /Music/iTunes/ folder to the external. Don't only copy the iTunes media folder.
Hold Option, launch iTunes, select Choose library... and select the iTunes folder on the external.
This is all you need to do.
Everything for iTunes (except the application) is on the external.
2nd I think (this was back in March 2013) I decided to cut/delete the folder Automatically Add to iTunes and moved it to one of my external hard drives (this folder for some reason contained mostly everythiing that was in the iTunes Media folder).
Make a shortcut to this folder on your desktop.
Nothing should be in this folder. When you put a file here, it will get moved by iTunes and added to the library.
The reason it had files in it is because you moved it.

How do I back up my itunes and music library to an ext hard drive?

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