I love iTunes because you can cherry pick your media purchases so you only have to pay for the specific songs or episodes you want and I fully believe in respecting copyrights and paying for those files I do want, I do not support illegal music or video file downloading. I also love iTunes because you skip all the transportation and packaging waste.
Here’s an iTunes tip that I want to share because I’m a bit obsessed with keeping my iTunes library ultra organized and this is the solution to a problem that has been plaguing me for ages. What do you do when you have more media than hard drive space?
I don’t have cable or satellite TV at home but I do have an Apple TV that I use for renting movies and buying the select few cable TV shows I want to watch (mainly Stargate Atlantis, I’m a bit of a science fiction geek). iTunes also offers several free TV show episodes for download every week and I download quite a few of those too.
Video takes up a huge amount of hard drive space though and while my laptop does have a 200gb hard drive, it seems like it’s always full so I move the video files to an external hard drive. The only problem is that then iTunes cannot find them to sync with my Apple TV or my iPhone. I’ve finally figured out a streamlined solution to storing my media on my external hard drive.
It seems like it should be as simple as setting the location of your library to the external hard drive, but it’s not because if you do that and the external hard drive is not connected even once when iTunes tries to access it, iTunes will default the setting back to your internal hard drive. If you’re on a desktop it’s pretty simple to keep your external hard drive connected and turned on all the time so it won’t reset that setting, but I’m on a laptop and want to be able to easily move my computer around and I want iTunes to be able to access my external hard drive any time it needs those media files.
Here’s the process if you’re on a Mac like me:
- Exit iTunes and move your “iTunes Music” folder from the iTunes folder on your internal hard drive to your external hard drive (depending on how much data you have it may take several hours for it to all copy over, if you have a lot of data you might want to do this overnight)
- Right click (or Ctrl click if you’re not using a mouse) on the “iTunes Music” folder on the external hard drive and choose “Make Alias”, the icon for this folder will look like a normal folder but with a little arrow on it
- Move the new “iTunes Music alias” folder back to the iTunes library folder on your internal hard drive (if you have not changed the defaults the path should look like “Music” > “iTunes” > “iTunes Music”)
- If you’re like me and don’t want to delete the existing files on your internal hard drive before you’re sure the new setup is working, change the old “iTunes Music” folder name to “iTunes Music Backup”
- Change the name of the “iTunes Music alias” folder to “iTunes Music” (so now everything is the same as it was before except the “iTunes Music” folder icon has the little arrow on it)
- Open iTunes
Keep in mind that you’ll only be able to access or sync your media when you’re connected to the external hard drive now.
If you’re using an Apple Airport or Time Capsule for your wireless connection, you can plug your external hard drive into it for wireless access which I think keeps the house looking much nicer and neater. My external hard drive (a Lacie Big Disk Extreme) has regular on and off power modes and a third “auto” mode for energy efficiency so that it will only run when I’m trying to access it. This is the ideal setup for me because my laptop remains totally wireless and nothing is left powered up when it doesn’t need to be.
If you’re using a desktop computer instead of a laptop though it’s just as easy to plug an external hard drive directly into your computer.
I do wish this would work for only my TV shows, movies, and podcasts so that I could keep my music on my internal hard drive, but when I tried setting it up that way, it would create new folders for the TV Shows I was downloading in the “iTunes Music” folder but outside of the “TV Shows” folder so that it could download them to my internal hard drive. If you want to download new media directly to your external hard drive you have to do the entire “iTunes Music” folder.
Shared in Tackle It Tuesday.
If you enjoyed this post, please check out my new blog: Carrie Actually – geek chic in the Silicon Valley.
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I just emailed you at the contact address at the bottom of the page… Subscribed now! Looking forward to your posts.
This is a great tip. I bought an AppleTV just to listen to music in my living room. The external drive works great because I can jam that thing full of lossless music and rock out in my living room. Much better than any CD player.
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Carrie,
I took my Macbook down to the Genius Bar at the Apple store about 6 months ago and they did it for me. I decided that the process was a bit complicated and that I would come back when I needed the help again. I’ve desperately got to get down there because I’m down to only about 1 G of space left! THIS time I’m going to write down the instructions so I can do it myself in the future. I’d love to email them to you when I get them, if you are interested – or take your computer and external hard drive down to your local Apple Store and they can help you do it. Just thought you might like to know! 
Thanks for posting the instructions for moving your iTunes library to a hard drive. I was thinking this was exactly what I needed but then I read the comment at the bottom saying that you were sad you couldn’t JUST move your video files and keep your music on your internal hard drive. I’m here to tell you that you CAN do this. I have my computer set up so that my tv video files are located on my external hard drive, but all my music is on my internal hard drive. HOWEVER – I don’t know how they did this.