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

Showing 2 responses by onhwy61

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.
This is a very simple task and I don't understand why people are trying to make it so complex. You've done everything correctly -- two separate drives with one serving as a backup. If each drive had the exact same info organized in the same file hierarchy, then all you have to do is rename the backup drive whatever name you gave the drive that died. You do not have to do anything within iTunes. iTunes won't know and won't care that it's not the original drive as long as the path to the data and music files is exactly the same. Of course, you would then need to get another drive as a backup.