Time machine and itunes backups?

The size/volume of my music library on my Time Machine backups is far smaller than my library on the imac itself. Does Time machine backup all music files or only those you loaded via CD. The size difference is similar to the music purchased from itunes store. is that relevant or just a coincidence?, thks, canyon

if you restore just individual items from the itunes folder and these items exist at present you'll be given a choice to keep both copies or to only keep the restored copies. I suggest you choose the latter. then there won't be any duplicates.

Similar Messages

  • TIme Machine and iTunes

    When I perform a back up using the time machine and my external hard drive, will the music in my itunes and the photos in iphoto be backed up as well? Thanks!

    Everything is included unless you exclude it. How you do that is:
    1. Open System Prefrences and click on Time Machine
    2. Then click on Options. If you want to exclude something click the + sign and use Finder to locate it and then add it. On your next TM backup that item willl be excluded.

  • Interaction of Time Machine and cloned backups.

    I am not sure how TM works so perhaps someone can explain what is going on here. I use TM to back-up my internal disk plus external firewire and external USB drives. The TM drive is a dedicated 1TB Lacie Firewire. In addition I keep a clone of my start-up drive (CarbonCopyCloner - CCC) on a weekly basis.
    Everything works swimingly but here's the question: I recently had to restore the start-up drive after a crash by restarting and restoring from the clone. That worked OK but then TM, on its next iteration, copied the whole drive (100GB) even though the vast majority of files were the same and unchanged. Is this normal behaviour? If so, I will be using up my TM filespace PDQ.

    I found this http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=4387985 which says:
    "Well thank me later I got it working fellas. It was there in front of our faces with the exception of doing a chown and chmod.
    Someone else please confirm I will post steps.
    1) disconnect airport disk and plug into computer as a USB drive directly.
    2) Set up time machine to use this volume.
    3) In terminal cd to volume "cd /Volume/HDD"
    4) In terminal "touch .com.apple.timemachine.supported" this will create an invisible file.
    5) In terminal "sudo chown root:admin .com.apple.timemachine.supported"
    6) In terminal "sudo chmod 1775 .com.apple.timemachine.supported"
    7) In terminal "ls -l -a" the .com.apple.timemachine.supported file should be -rwxrwxr-t
    8) eject disk, unplug from mac, plug into Airport.
    9) mount at mac using connect to server in finder (command k) and afp://airportname.local./HDname
    10) see if time machine now sees the drive and tries to use it."
    Also, this http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=4388264
    " A simpler method....
    I also got Time Machine working over AEBS but with a much simpler method.
    1. Connect your USB disk directly to the Mac
    2. Set up Time Machine and let your initial backup run
    3. Eject the disk and connect to the AEBS
    4. You need to 'touch' the disk by opening it in Finder, then Time Machine realises where it is and carries on.
    Works for me on my iMac (wired) and Macbook (wireless to AEBS) - TM keeps the backups tidily with separate directories for each machine.
    Still have an issue with my Macbook - it doesn't see the disks after sleeping.
    Obviously Apple need to fix this - it shouldn't need me to view the disk each time so that TM can see it, and it should enable direct access to new disks via AEBS."

  • Time Machine and iTunes - huge iTunes backups

    I've been using Time Machine since Jan 2009 for my MacBook. I'm having an issue that I don't understand with iTunes. I use the utility TimeTracker (highly recommended) to find out why my backup drive was almost full...turns out it was making a full VMWare image everytime I made a change to Windows. Easy fix.
    I still noticed however that I have two backups of over 40GB. Investigating with TimeTracker, it is iTunes. I've checked and it seems the files backed up are not new...most of them anyway.
    My question is this...if I restore these backups, will they clog my iTunes with a bunch of duplicates? Don't think I can go through them one at a time. I have a utility to check for duplicates but it seems a pretty laborious process.
    Thanks for any insights.

    if you restore just individual items from the itunes folder and these items exist at present you'll be given a choice to keep both copies or to only keep the restored copies. I suggest you choose the latter. then there won't be any duplicates.

  • Time Machine and iTunes: hd failure, tm restore, itunes permissions problms

    Hi,
    Can someone please help me?
    I had my brothers old laptop, a powerbook g4 al 15" 1.25 ghz, 2 gig ram, 80g hd. The hd failed a couple days ago with big clicks that sounded like that arm slapping backing a forth. So, I bought a new 160 gig hard drive from ifixit, and replaced that yesterday. I installed leopard. I wanted a fresh install, so I just installed in normally, and then went manually into the external hard drive (500gb), and tried getting some of my music back from itunes in the time machine backup folders. It did not work well, and I could not find all of them, so, I re-instered the leopard install disc.
    I restored from Time Machine (not migrate because i did not know about it at the time), and have what looks like my old laptop back. Now I went to copy my itunes music from my laptop to my iphone, and here is my problem:
    My iTunes now says that 49 of my files are not authorized to play on this computer. I could give the exact error; it is: "..." well actually I can't right now because I am running onyx to try to fix disk permissions, so when that is over I could give the error message.
    Does anyone know what to do?
    The end of all this is to backup all my iTunes music on a disk (which includes downloads from emusic.com), and then delte the whole OS, and reinstall leopard, again, with a fresh install, but this time with my itunes restored.
    Thanks,
    JW
    Message was edited by: jkyhfgkg
    Message was edited by: jkyhfgkg
    Message was edited by: jkyhfgkg

    in that case it shouldn't count as a new computer when you authorize it. If for some strange reason it does count as a new computer you can deauthorize all your currently authorized computers and then authorize the ones you need.
    To do that in iTunes go to Store menu->View my accounts, and then click Deauthorize All. If you don't see this option, it's because you don't have five authorized computers.

  • Kext cleanup, now time machine and itunes not working

    I cleaned up all my kext files from Sep 2013 back (as suggested in an article) to address the kernel_task overload, but now itunes won't play (play button works but songs do not move forward), time machine will not restore backup and no audio comes from google chrome. Do I need to reinstall each individual program/application? Will a reinstall of Mavericks work?

    The article was written by an idiot.
    If you don't already have a current backup, back up all data, then reinstall the OS.* You don't need to erase the startup volume, and you won't need the backup unless something goes wrong. If the system was upgraded from an older version of OS X, you may need the Apple ID and password you used.
    If you use FileVault 2, then before running the Installer you must launch Disk Utility and select the icon of the FileVault startup volume ("Macintosh HD," unless you gave it a different name.) It will be nested below another icon with the same name. Click the Unlock button in the toolbar and enter your login password when prompted. Then quit Disk Utility to be returned to the main Recovery screen.
    There are ways to back up a computer that isn't fully functional. Ask if you need guidance.
    If you installed the Java runtime distributed by Apple and still need it, you'll have to reinstall it. The same goes for Xcode. All other data will be preserved.
    *The linked support article refers to OS X 10.9 ("Mavericks"), but the procedure is the same for OS X 10.7 ("Lion") and later.

  • Time Machine and iTunes Issue

    What I'm using first: OS X 10.7.1 - iTunes 10.4 - 1TB external Time Machine Drive - apx 90,000 songs -  A big pain in the a**
    So I had a problem with about 90% of my music file paths being not correct and iTunes not finding the files. Basically I had about 40GB of music on my internal HD and the remaining 400GB on my external. I wanted to move my 40GB to my external and have iTunes recognize this. So I make a backup before I do anything and begin working on it. Copied the 40gb to the external and deleted all my iTunes info with the intent to re-import the music and then replace the .xml file so I would have all my playlist, play counts, ratings, ect. I had read a “how to” and understood the process and all would have worked well if……..
    The Time Machine does not have the .xml file and is missing about half of my old music in that same folder. Why in the world would Time Machine not have my old .xml file anywhere? I ended up looking through ALL of my old backups dating back to June and not one is there…. 
    Is there any way to find/recover this file?

    Solved!  At last!
    I cannot say exactly which step was the key, so here are most of the steps I took.  Hopefully this helps someone.
    1. Took the steps in Invalid or incorrect Certificates including reboot.
    2. Took the steps in Edit your Keychain including reboot.
    3. Downloaded and manually reinstalled Security Update 2015-004.
    4. Repaired permissions and directories with Recovery reboot.
    5. Took the steps in Invalid or incorrect Certificates including reboot.
    6. Took the steps in Edit your Keychain including reboot.
    I've gone through some of these steps multiple times, just hoping it would work that time...
    Today -- when I went into Mail.app, it whined about the certs for me.com servers -- so I made *that* always trusted.  And this time, iTunes.app didn't complain about any certs!  And this time, Software Update.app didn't complain about any certs!  And it successfully applied the three-week delayed updates!
    So I'm hoping it's all done and done.  OMG, frustrating along the way!

  • Can I use the same drive to backup with Time Machine and Windows Backup?

    I've got a 1TB external hard drive that I'm currently using for Time Machine backups and also it stores about 300GBs of music. Can I partition the drive to add an NTFS formatted partition and use that partition with Vista's Backup/Restore feature? If so, how do I partition the drive? Forgive me, I'm a neophyte when it comes to Windows. Also, I don't want to lose the music files already saved on the Time Machine partition.

    While you can add HFS+ volumes to an existing drive, adding NTFS requires taking chances: change to FAT and then convert to NTFS.
    I'd invest in another backup. I don't even rely 100% on any one backup method; drive; let alone TimeMachine. A bootable backup should also be part of your strategy for OS X. So I would create a smallish 40GB emergency boot volume - for OS X use only.
    For Vista, I use the built-in features of Ultimate/Business AND Prosoft Engineering DataBackup PC. Norton Ghost started out okay but gradually deteriorated, though their 2009 360 2.0 or something....
    I would not want to use WinClone except as one-time 'snap shot' or emergency; useful when moving to a new larger hard drive, and if your Vista partition is small and not 100GB of files.
    I'd look at 500GB+ drive to use solely for Vista backup and media files.
    MacSales has $79-89 FW800/400 case for SATA drives, and just throw a good 640GB WD Caviar in for $78 and good to go.
    http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MEFW934AL1KS/
    http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MEFW934FWU2K/
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  • Partitioning 1.2T External Hard Drive for Time Machine and PC backup?

    We have a 1.2T Seagate external hard drive. I partitioned it so that I could use part of it for my Time Machine backups and want to be able to use the rest of it for the PCs in the house. I formatted the rest of the space using the Disc Utility and the MS-DOS option. Was this the wrong choice? I can't use the PC space on the hard drive on my PC. It says there are 0 bytes available.
    Help?

    Fred Elmendorf wrote:
    We have a 1.2T Seagate external hard drive. I partitioned it so that I could use part of it for my Time Machine backups and want to be able to use the rest of it for the PCs in the house. I formatted the rest of the space using the Disc Utility and the MS-DOS option. Was this the wrong choice?
    no, that was the right choice. I don't know what's going on there. you just might need to reformat the whole drive. also check the partition scheme for the drive. it should be GUID. if it's not GUID repartition the drive with GUID partition scheme.
    I can't use the PC space on the hard drive on my PC. It says there are 0 bytes available.
    Help?

  • Does a new name for the internal HD make my Time Machine (and CCC) backups useless?

    I have a replacement 1TB internal HD that I need to clone from my existing internal HD, using Carbon Copy Cloner. Initially I'll connect it in an external enclosure via USB, no questions on that.
    I'd like to give the new HD itself a new name. Is there any way to have the new drive recognize all the corresponding data on my external drive Time Machine. Or will I have to start all over? I know that means I'd lose several months' worth of TM data.
    As long as I'm asking about TM, does the same principle apply to the 1:1 clones made with CCC?
    Thanks for any help.

    No problem with renaming the clone drive something else, in fact it's recommended.
    However for best results I suggest doing so while option key booted from the clone, just in case.

  • Carbon Clone and Time Machine: developing a backup plan

    Howdy all!
    This is a second post that sort of flows on from another I have written today
    https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4649740
    I initally put them all together, but they were too rambling and disconnected, so it seemed better to seperate them. The question I have here is how best to organise my backup plan? I have a few ideas, but, basically, want to make sure I get the whole setup right the first time and would appreciate any advice from others that have been down the path before. As I am still waiting for some parts to arrive in the mail, I have a little time to think about how to go about setting up my Mac.
    Basically the setup is:
    Mac Mini 2012, boot drive is a Samsung 256GB 830 series SSD, seconday drive for data is a 1TB mechanical disk. I plan on having all my data on the seconday mechanical disk (photos, movies, music etc) and only the OS and Applications on the SSD. To this end, I understand I only have to move /Users to the mechanical disk to achieve this. I then also have 2x 2TB Western Digital MyBook Essential USB 3 disks for Time Machine backups. I plan on rotating them on a weekly basis (storing the disk not in use in a safe or offsite), and then, depending on costs a cloud backup service for some data (music, photos etc) which I might want to access when im not at home.
    So I have been thinking for a few days now on the benefit of having a Carbon Clone bootable recovery drive. The thinking goes along these lines. As my data is on a seperate drive, and is backed up to Time Machine, in the event of an OS disk failure, I can replace the disk and then point /Users to the new drive, and I can be up and running once I have reinstalled the apps i need. Now, I understand the idea of the Carbon Clone backup is such that it speeds up the time to rebuild the OS disk, but I have to question, how useful is this in reality?
    Consider, I can sit down now and write down all the apps I have needed in the past, install Mac OS, set it up (possibly with a generic admin password), install the apps I need from the App store and DVDs etc and then take a Carbon Clone at this point before any setup of Apps are done. If the apps configuration is backed up in the Time Machine backup (i.e.: the config files exist under /Users) then this is almost workable - in a recovery situation, the CC clone is used to rebuild the OS drive, the config files are pulled from the TM backups, and we're back up and running. Where this fails, is if I have installed (or removed) apps since the CC clone was made. At this point then, is it best to (a) make a new clone when a new app is added/removed or (b) make a note of apps added/removed, which will then have to be reinstalled if a recovery is required. I tend to think the (b) method is best here, as it preserves the integrity of the clone. If the machine has been compromised (malware etc) then remaking the clone, causes the clone to be compromised and hence the reinstalled machine as well. Though this method could be a pain if the machine state has changed somewhat over time. Also, it means that the reinstalled system will be missing updates etc which could be time consuming to apply anyway, so the usefulness of a clone is slightly reduced anyway.
    Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Some days I think having a clone will be useful esp. as most of my software was delivered on CD (Adobe Creative Suite, Office) or are large install bases (XCode), but other days I think, "its not a mission critical machine", i can survive a day without it while I rebuild the install, and so I dont achieve much by having a clone which is likely out-of-date by the time I go to use it.
    Also, in this backup plan, is it best to rely on TM for things like email backup or a dedicated mail backup utility? can a Carbon Clone exist on the same disk as Time Machine uses, or do I need to invest in a new disk or two for the CC clones?
    As I say, I want to make sure I have this machine setup right from the start, and would really appreciate any pointers, tips or advice.

    There is one big advantage of a clone.  You can immediately reboot
    to it and continue working and deal with the regular boot drive faiure,
    what ever it may be, later.  Especially since all your data and such
    is on another drive.  If you use your computer for work and time
    critical projects, this is a major plus!
    In the case of a hard drive failure/replacement, copying the clone
    to the drive is the fastest way to get the system and all your settings
    back.
    Time Machine and incremental backups have a place as well.  It is best
    suited for "incremental" problems.  Examples are installing an upgrade to
    software that doesn't work or just don't plain like.  With Time Machine it
    is easy to just restore back to the point before the install.
    Something else I do is backup current project files to USB memory sticks.
    If you are using your computer for business, you can never have too many
    backups.  Coralllary 456 of Murphy's Law is the "number of backups that
    you need will be one more than what you have!"

  • Long story short....I restored my computer to an earlier point using time machine and now all of the previous back-ups are gone. My question has to do with itunes...is it possible to restore my itunes library to the most recent backup because the restore

    Long story short....I restored my computer to an earlier point using time machine and now all of the previous back-ups are gone. My question has to do with itunes...is it possible to restore my itunes library to the most recent backup because the restore that I did was in march and the latest backup was in may....the reason being is that there were app that i had downloaded that are in my most recent back-up, that were not in the backup I restored to. Is it possible to just restore one application ie)itunes?

    See this post.
    tt2

  • Can I view photos and movies from my external hard drive? I used Time Machine and a WD Passport for backup. Since my drive on my MacBook Pro is filling up I was planning to delete some of the movies and photos.

    Can I view photos and movies from my external hard drive? I used Time Machine and a WD Passport for backup. Since my drive on my MacBook Pro is filling up I was planning to delete some of the movies and photos. I wanted to see if I could view them from the hard drive. Thanks

    Hello, eco1. 
    Thank you for visiting Apple Support Communities. 
    This sounds like you are wanting to move your iTunes media folder to an external drive and have iTunes this folder from this location.  If this is the case then I would recommend taking a look at the article below. 
    iTunes for Mac: Moving your iTunes Media folder
    http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1449
    Cheers,
    Jason H. 

  • All itunes data gone...can I reload from Time Machine and external HD

    Okay, so maybe I was the stupid one and deleted all of my ITunes library....don't yell, I just wanted to free up some HD space...
    Fortunately I use Time Machine and an external HD to back everything up..can I reload my Itunes library from Time Machine and the external HD..can anyone walk me through the process?

    docutale1 wrote:
    Hi there,
    I've done some searching and i haven't been able to find the answer to this problem. I am wondering if someone can help me with this.
    My HD was faulty so i had it replaced.  my complete 300gb music library was backed up on an external HD. The iTunes program was running on my local HD. So i ran the local iTunes off of my ext. HD.
    Now that i have a new HD and i restored everything from Time Machine,
    Did you restore the entire disk from Time Machine?
    Boot from your System install DVD then Restore from backup and select the Time Machine drive?
    See this -> http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/14.html

  • I backed up my macbook pro using time machine and now my iphoto and itunes are empty. how do I reset the computer to an earlier date?

    I backed up my macbook pro using time machine and now my iphoto and itunes are empty. how do I reset the computer to an earlier date? and why would this have happened?

    Without more information, I can't tell you why it happened. As to how to restore to an earlier date, please check out the article below. Should help you to restore form a time machine backup.
    http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1427

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