Using external hard drive to MacBook and using iTunes

As my MacBook hard drive is approaching fullness I'm going go direct iTunes to save all my Music to the WD external hard drive which I have partitioned to have Time Machine in its own space and other files in a separate partition.
With that the case, when I'm not connected to the external drive I can't access my Library, however...also if I"m not connected to the external drive and acquire new music...how does iTunes store the new sound files if the Library is not connected??? Does iTunes create a second Library???....and if so how do I then import the new sounds to the main library??
Thank You...Bob

If iTunes can not find the iTunes folder on the external drive as you set in the preferences, it will default back to the iTunes folder on your internal drive and it will do it silently, so you may not realize for a while that it is storing your stuff on the internal drive even though the external was later hooked back up.
Patrick

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How can i use external hard drive with mac and pc!

I've been using a Lacie external hard drive with my mac to keep the itunes library and other things since day one. Since i have a dvd with files for windows and an old pc without a dvd drive, i decided to copy and paste the content of the dvd to the external hard drive. The only problem now is that when i plug the external hard drive to pc, it won't open. I know it has to be formatted in a different way, but i need to find out the best solution!
Any idea?

You can format the external drive in Fat32 (which I don't recommend but is the most compatible between both platforms), or NTFS (which requires some work to get your Mac to recognize), or HFS+ (which requires special software on your PC so your PC can use it).
If you use this drive mostly with your Mac, get MacDrive for your PC:
http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive
If you use this drive mostly with your PC, here's some software for you Mac. I haven't tried this myself, but the professional reviews have been good:
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

Moving itunes from external hard-drive to another and using another comput

Hi,
This has probably been posted before but i couldn't find it.
My itunes works on another computer, with the library (Edit->Preferences->Itunes location as g:\itunes), this includes the xml files for the library.
I've now got a new laptop and external hard-drive and want to move the library onto the new hard-drive and use it on the new laptop.
I think i can copy the itunes folder from old hard-drive onto new one, then point the itunes install on the new laptop to the new harddrive and it should pick it up?
Any ideas?
Matt

Welcome to AD!
+this includes the xml files for the library.+
Does this also include the important itunes database file, the one with the ITL file extension?
If so, your idea should work. Use Windows Explorer to copy the ITL & music files/folders over to the new exHD.
Connect the new exHD to your laptop and make sure Windows sees it as drive G:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307844
That is a very important step. Otherwise, iTunes will lose all the paths to the music.
Now start itunes on the laptop by pressing *and holding* the shift key. Tell it to use the ITL file on the G: drive. Then set your iTunes preoferences to have any future additions go to the G: drive music folder.

My macbook pro's memory is full and I purchased an external hard drive. I am using timemachine, but need to earse/free up some memory on my laptop. How do I do this?

My macbook pro's memory is full and I purchased an external hard drive. I am using timemachine, but need to earse/free up some memory on my laptop. How do I do this?

Christinag1317 wrote:
My macbook pro's memory is full and I purchased an external hard drive. I am using timemachine, but need to earse/free up some memory on my laptop. How do I do this?
Ok when you refer to "memory" that is the Random Access Memory which is temporary memory the processor (worker) uses to store stuff while it's using it. Power goes off whats in the memory is gone.
Your storage drive is where data is pernamnetly stored if the power is on/off.
So what you really mean to say is your storage drive is filled up and you need to make some room.
You have a TimeMachine drive, what this does is makes a image of your internal storage drive as a backup method, it also allows some "back in time" restoration of your previous deleted files depending how much space is on that drive. The more space, the less data you have, the more days you can go back in time to retrieve something.
Unfortunatly the TimeMachine drive is not a extra space storage drive, it automatically rotates what appears on your internal storage drive. So if you delete something from the internal drive, it eventually gets deleted from the TimeMachine drive.
So you need to make some more room on your internal drive, this is rather easy, all you need is ANOTHER external drive and connect it to the Mac. Give it a name like ExtraStorage#1 and thenyou will have to decide which of your User files you really don't need on the internal drive.
For instance the best choice would be to move some movies out of your Movies folder to another MoviesExtra folder on the ExtraStorage#1 drive.
Movies take a LOT of drive space and you can always copy them on or off, or watch them from the ExtraStorage#1 drive as well. But if your going to do this a lot, you should consider getting a Firewire 800/400, USB 3,2,1 combination drive as Firewire 800 is fastest and decently priced (Thunderbolt is very high priced and overkill at this time)
The other things like Documents are quite small, Pictures can take a lot of space if you have a lot, but if you need them on the internal drive then that's better. Music one tends to use a lot or manage playlists and such, but perhaps some music you may which to move off or "prune", I suggest always burning data DVD's of music especially for extra backups.
Once you have freed some room on the internal drive, this liitle neat program will show you what is taking the largest amount of space on your internal drive.
http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/
After a scan, right click on the big squares to "revel in Finder" to show you what's taking the largest amount of space, be warned it also opens up hidden system files and folders, which you won't be able to move. So concentrate on what's inthe Users folder.
Likely if you have a lot of Movies this is the biggest culprit on most standard internal hard drives. Also if you have something in iTunes that's auto-downloading something like PodCasts and not deleting the older ones and you forget. So go there and fix things and that can free up drive space.
If you bought a small SSD with your new Mac, then the price of that SSD has come back to haunt you with low storage space, you will have to think carefully what you can live without on the internal drive.
Once you have slimmed things down, TimeMachine will update to reflect your slimmer internal drive. What this means is there is only one copy of your data on the ExtraStorage#1 drive.
You need to maintain two copies of your data at all times on seperate hardware, so now you need ANOTHER storage drive (ExtraStorage#2) to copy everythinng of ExtraStorage#1, or else if you drop or have a mechanical problem with ES#1 all that data will be gone!
If you wish to learn more then I suggest reading these two links
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16276201#16276201
http://pondini.org/OSX/Home.html

Using Carbon Copy Cloner which is quicker firewire 800 Macbook Pro to external hard drive or Macbook Pro to same via Airport Extreme?

Using Carbon Copy Cloner which is quicker firewire 800 Macbook Pro to external hard drive or Macbook Pro to same via Airport Extreme?

Firewire 800 is the fastest and most reliable. Also it's bootable if you hold the option key down on a wired or built in keyboard. Not bootable via Airport obviously or if Filevault is used.
It's only your first clone that's usually takes the longest, it's shorter when it updates as you only do the changes which you can control to keep a pure clone if you wish.
Most commonly used backup methods

Just got Prosoft drive genius 3 software, and it's telling me that the external hard drive that i am using for my time machine back up drive needs to be defragmented. is it wise to do this or should i not??

just got Prosoft drive genius 3 software, and it's telling me that the external hard drive that i am using for my time machine back up drive needs to be defragmented. is it wise to do this or should i not??

Let's hope a couple things: that you have bootable clones of your drives also; that the backup drive for TimeMachine has over 3x capacity of the data you plan and are storing. I would also switch TM backup drives so you have a 2nd.
Fragmented free space affecting performance happens when the drive is too full which may mean there isn't enough free space for a full backup set.
1.5TB for backing up 500GB, while WD Green 3TB is $140 and WD Black 1.5TB is, about the same price.
I'd be worried about the integrity and directory, and whether you can afford to lose that drive. Defragging is also a very slow operation. the ideal: to just clone a drive, or start over with another drive and wait. cloning TM volumes has not been done or has it? SuperDuper hoped to but I don't think they or Bombich's CCC made it there.
Trouble with highly fragged is when free space gets to 20% normally, 1/3 or so though for TM volumes, and finding where and a chunk of space for the file being written. Does TM use large spare image files of like 2GB?
Best would be to ask in the TimeMachine section Snow Leopard
https://discussions.apple.com/community/mac_os/mac_os_x_v10.6_snow_leopard?view= discussions#/?tagSet=1009
where there are some good FAQ and tutorials, and people that know the ins-and-outs and shortcomings.

HT201250 Do I need to partition my external hard drive if I'm using Time Machine and other storage?

I never used Time Machine before. I was storing select files on my external hard drive as well as using my libraries (IPhoto, ITune, IMovies) directly off of the external hard drive. That hard drive is giving me problems, so I bought a new one. I want to set up Time Machine on this one, but I also want to keep my active libraries on it. Do I need to partition the external hard drive?

You can partition the new drive, just don't make one of the partitons a TimeMachine drive, save a TM for a entire drive with more space than the boot drive as it saves "states" thus requires more room than most people expect.
I highly advise one drive to one drive for backups, and not placing too many backup eggs in one vulnerable hardware basket basically.
Drives are cheap, data is not. Hardware can fail just as often as software, so you need a multiple backup and storage stragedy to protect even against theft and fire.
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What format i should use for my external hard drive that can be used interchangeably between mac and pc?

What format i should use for my external hard drive that can be used interchangeably between mac and pc?

Usually Fat32/MS-DOS as mentioned, but that has several limitatiuns, like 4GB filesize limit.
One option is MacDrive for you PCs... allows them to Read/Write HFS+...
http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/
More options...
NTFS-3G Stable Read/Write Driver...
http://www.ntfs-3g.org/
MacFUSE: Full Read-Write NTFS for Mac OS X, Among Others...
http://www.osnews.com/story/16930

My final cut is running extremely slow after having for 6 months. I use external hard drives and save nothing on my computer. it takes a long time to render now. do you think something is wrong with computer. took it to mac store but they fail to help

my final cut is running extremely slow after having for 6 months. I use external hard drives and save nothing on my computer. it takes a long time to render now. do you think something is wrong with computer. took it to mac store but they fail to help me. I have a 13 inch mac book pro 10.6.8 8gb 2.3 gfz intel core i5

What did Apple tell you about what they did (or did not) find here?
See if working on the main disk is any faster.
USB2 is glacial, as I/O interconnects go. And USB2 disks have been known to fail, or sometimes to drop back to USB1 speeds, too. FireWire 800 is substantially faster than USB2, but still not as fast as the internal drive connections can provide.
Put another way, start varying your configuration, and see which configuration changes (still) have the problem, and which don't.

I use only two channels, have plenty of memory in my hard disk, and external hard drive, no effects, and still having problems with Garage band. Giving messages as you have too many live channels

I'm frustrated, I am doing everything you recommend, I use only two channels, have plenty of memory in my hard disk, and external hard drive, no effects, and still having problems with Garage band. Giving messages as you ave too many live channels, the disk is slow prepare...can you help?

Quote from: Richard on 15-November-07, 20:33:05
tornado2003,
What you need to do is boot into Safe Mode. Then delete the VGA Drivers.
After that boot normally and install the latest nVidia ForceWare Drivers
Take Care,
Richard
i guess you missed that:
Quote from: tornado2003 on 15-November-07, 17:26:52
ive tryed booting xp in safe mode but it just freezes after it loads up a couple of needed files .
ive even formatted my hard drive and tryed installing a fresh xp on it but it just keeps locking up when it gets to the "starting windows setup" .(this is just after it loads all the drivers from the xp cd)

How to use external hard drive and iTunes together?

how to use external hard drive and iTunes together?

Yes I did get to that part.... I went trough external to retrive itunes folder... When I selected the folder, it said that it was locked, choose another folder... I then went to my external again to my itunes folder and and used command I to see if folder was locked and it wasn't.... it was suggested on another forum to reboot.. which I did and still same problem... All I want to do is link my external hard drive that has my itunes playlist from another Mac to my new one.. and to also use the external as the main source for adding new songs to my playlist...

So I am trying to copy my hard drive "Macintosh HD" to an external hard drive, i want to use Terminal and have tried many ways. For example cp -r /Volumes/"Macintosh HD" /Volumes/"NO NAME". When i do it says No such file or directory. Ideas?

So I am trying to copy my hard drive "Macintosh HD" to an external hard drive, i want to use Terminal and have tried many ways. For example cp -r /Volumes/"Macintosh HD" /Volumes/"NO NAME". When i do it says No such file or directory. Ideas?

The reason that threadjacking is frowned on (as mentioned in the terms use which you can read by clicking the link to the right on this page) is for the most part a practical one:
By starting your own thread your problem can get individual attention, focussed on your particular set of circumstances.
By joining somebody else's thread it becomes tricky to answer more than one question at the same time, and can lead to confusion for both parties.
So if you don't mind the minor inconvenience, please start your own thread (in the correct forum) so we can get to grips with your particular problem!

Can I use an external hard drive to download and store my iTunes library?

Can I use an external hard drive to download and store my iTunes library?

Yes - in most cases you can just copy your entire library (by default C:\Users\username\Music\iTunes) to your external drive, with the result being a iTunes folder in the root of that drive with a structure like this:
Then hold down SHIFT when you start iTunes, and when you see this prompt:
click on Choose Library..., navigate to the iTunes folder on your external drive, and click Open. See turingtest2's user tip on Make a split library portable for more information, including steps you may need to take to align your library structure before moving it to an external drive - this applies if you currently have some/all of the media in your library stored outside the standard iTunes Media folders.

How do I copy email database from my old computer to my new computer using external hard drive

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That's what happens when you rightclick on a Mailbox, what happens when you do it?
Post a screenshot.

When I connect an external hard drive to macbook pro it is very slow to appear on the desktop and Finder window, sometimes 20 mins or more, even with auto backup switched off . any clues?

when I connect an external hard drive to macbook pro it is very slow to appear on the desktop and Finder window, sometimes 20 mins or more, even with auto backup switched off . any clues?

Hi robfromkinglake west,
Try and isolate the issue. Check if it's only with this drive.
Check the drive with Disk Utility
Using Disk Utility to verify or repair disks
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1782
I've never seen a drive take 20 minutes to mount.
Nubz

Using external hard drive to MacBook and using iTunes

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