iTunes question

Luke

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Location
Milwaukee, WI USA
Name
Luke
I've had iTunes running a LONG time on the record store's computer. A couple years back, I brought in an external hard drive and copied the library (from my Windows PC running iTunes) onto it in case the computer kicked the bucket.

Fast forward to present day and I'm WAY overdue to back up iTunes again. What is the proper way to actually do this?

And please speak slowly.....I'm stupid.

Also, once backed up, I plan on taking it home and transferring it to my Windows PC at home and having the same library of tunes in both places. At that point, what is the best way to do a monthly backup (I think 2 PCs and an additional external hard drive with the same material should make me reasonably bulletproof).

Thanks in advance for your time (and expertise).
 
I use both an external drive and an online backup. That way I figure I'm covered in anything short of an apocolypse... I do it for photos and music and pretty much any data. Although I'm less concerned about the music now with services like Spotify and Beats music - I really only need to back up a handful of really obscure things I've got. I use Time Machine for the local backup - I don't know what the equivalent is on the PC side, but it's incredibly easy and transparent on the Mac. And I use Backblaze for the online backup. I used to use Carbonite but I don't think they back up external drives, or maybe they do for PC but not Mac. In any case, once I started keeping my photos on an external drive Carbonite didn't work anymore and Backblaze does...

In terms of HOW to make a backup, I think the way you did it the first time is probably still the right way if you don't have something more automated like Time Machine. But I'm not sure how Apple deals with the same library being maintained on two machines, at least if you have any music you bought from them. If you didn't and you don't have an iTunes account, I guess it should be easy enough...

-Ray
 
I'm laughing to hard to really take a shot at a serious answer. But I guess a drag and drop might be all you'd need to do. I'm really not sure as it's been a while since my backups haven't been automated to the extent that I've dropped / forgotten all of my strategies for doing it manually...

-Ray
 
ITunes is pernicious. I liberated my music from it and eliminated it from my life nearly a lustrum ago and have not looked back. I tried to run it on two windows machines simultaneously plus a backup and it was a DRM disaster. Fortunately there are jailbreak tools available - Google "iTunes jailbreak". Playlists were the worst to port as I recall.
 
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Unless your music collection doesnt change much from month to month, I'd recommend more frequent backups. I have never used either of the above but it seems they are very similar to the program I use on my mac, which is Carbon Copy Cloner: Mac Backup Software | Carbon Copy Cloner | Bombich Software. I use it to clone the internal drive and make it bootable every week, and I have two external drives with stuff I never want to lose... one is a clone of the other. Its time I replaced those, as well, because I've had them a long time. YOu can't rely on any drive to last forever. I need to do the same for the internal drive's clone drive as well.

Backup backup backup and do not leave it for months between. Set up a schedule, automate it, and stick to it.
 
Or you could look into a little utility from Microsoft (as you are a wondows wuser) called "SyncToy" ... you can select the directories (folders) you want to copy, and after the first full copy, it'll only (if you tell it to) sync the changes, so that you don;t copy a load on unnecessary crap each time And you can use the scheduler to run it.

Much simpler than many back up utilities and because it isn;t generating backup files in some godawful proprietary format, a bit safer in my opinion. Not humble.

not any good as a full-scale backup-up-every-byte-in-case-of-failure-so-you-can-restore-from-scratch solution, but excellent for (say) a collection of moozik files
 
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