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How Do I Point iTunes to use my backup ext drive?

I use iTunes on a Mac Mini with 2 external 500GB disk drives. I use one of the external disk drives strictly as a backup. All I do to backup my iTunes information is I copy the complete contents of the iTUNES folder on my primary drive to the backup drive by the drag & drop (copy) feature. As you Mac users know, the iTunes folder contains 4 sub folders with the Music Library, Album artwork and XML file.

Well the dreaded day has come and I suffered a hard disk crash. No problem as my backup disk contains all of my needed iTunes files. However when I try to access my playlists, iTunes tells me it can't find the song title. I can change the location of the song title to the backup drive and it finds it successfully, but with over 4,000 songs ripped I can't imagine that I have to do this for every song. I changed the Advanced Preferences in iTunes to point to the backup location, but I think this is only to tell iTunes where to rip new music.

How do I tell iTunes to reference the backup drive so that it can find my playlists and music files?

Thanks in advance,
Brian ...
cycles2
herman
2,290 posts
 
The library file has pointers to each song that includes the exact path to it.

It finds the song Cafe 1930 from Al Di Meola plays Piazzolla on my external drive named Music 1 by following this pointer to the song in Music 1/Al Di Meola/Di Meola plays Piazzolla/Cafe 1930

key>Location file://localhost/Volumes/Music%201/Al%20Di%20Meola/Di%20Meola%20Plays%20Piazzolla/02%20Cafe%201930.m4a

....so if any of that info changes iTunes can't find it.

If you change the name of the backup drive to the exact name of the original drive and the folder structure is the same it may be able to find them. I have never tried it so can't say for sure.

You can always delete the original library and just drag and drop the backup drive into iTunes and it will rebuild it, but you will lose play lists and ratings and other stuff that isn't tagged to the songs.
istanbulu
291 posts
 
As I said in an earlier PC Audio thread earlier this week...

This is a good starting point. Lots of beginner's nitty gritty. I found it helpful when I began my iTunes' quest.

http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1220425&seqNum=01

Also, iTunes help is very helpful!
onhwy61's avatar
onhwy61
5,357 posts
 
You need to give the backup drive the exact same path name as the dead drive. Once you set up your next backup drive you would be better off physically separating the drives as much as possible.
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