Backing up your purchased content from iTunes Store
It has been a while since I backup any valuable digital content, especially iTunes only allow their content be downloaded once, and once only.
I have quite a few songs, mobile applications, audiobooks and movies that I bought from Apple iTunes Store. I certainly don’t want to lose them all if for any unfortunate mishap should happen to my computer or the hard drive.
So I went ahead and look for the best way to backup, and it is pretty much straight forward to be honest. Built into iTunes, there’s a simple way to do backup to CD/DVD, but what little known (although documented in Apple’s Knowledge Base) is backing up to an external hard drive.
Method 1 – How to back up your media in iTunes
From iTunes, you can back up your library (or purchased content only) by following the following simple steps.
1) Go to File > Library > Back Up to Disc…
2) When the iTunes Backup dialog appears, you have the option to choose either “Back up entire iTunes library and playlists” or “Back up only iTunes Store purchases”. You can also do incremental backup by checking the “Only back up items added or changed since last backup”.
3) Select the Disc Burner from the dropdown menu if you have more than one optical drive. In my situation, my burner did not work as expected so I attached an external optical drive and it works like charm – probably time to upgrade the factory included optical drive…
4) Click “Back Up” to start the process. Depending on how big is your library, this process can take a while to complete.
The above steps are in detailed on Apple’s Knowledge Base – HT1382.
Method 2 – Back up your iTunes library by copying to an external hard drive
This method is slightly more complicated, and depending on which version of iTunes you are using. For me I’m using iTunes 9.
1) Make sure your iTunes library is stored at a location you can find easily in the later steps. It is also helpful to make sure that you allow iTunes to “Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library”. You can check this option in iTunes preferences by going to Edit > Preferences… > Advanced tab and check the iTunes Media folder location (for later use) and checked the appropriate checkbox as mentioned earlier.
2) Consolidate the content by going to File > Library > Organize Library… and check the “Consolidate files” – this will put all content to the designated iTunes Media folder. If you recently upgraded from earlier version of iTunes to iTunes 9, it is a good time to check the “Upgrade to iTunes Media organization”. Click “OK” and this should take a short while for iTunes to reorganise your files around.
Note: In the above step, iTunes will/may leave some empty folders behind when it shifted files around, so feel free to remove empty unwanted folders, or not… if it doesn’t bother you much.
3) Once the library has been reorganised (and upgraded), you can just simply copy the whole iTunes Media folder which contains all your songs, mobile applications, audiobooks, podcasts, movies and what-not. The location of this folder is mentioned in step 1.
4) Copy the now consolidated iTunes Media folder to an external hard drive or somewhere safe for future restore/import.
The above steps are in detailed on Apple’s Knowledge Base - HT1751.
This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Handy Tips, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.