Cloning External Hard Drives?

I currently have 2 x LaCie D2 Quadra Drives hosting my iTunes Library as follows:

• LaCie 3TB D2 Quadra (v3.0) = 2.54 TB Used
  Where = /Volumes/iTunes Media
  What = Configured as Media File Location and Contains all iTunes Media (Except Movies)
• LaCie 2TB D2 Quadra (v2.2) = 1.6 TB Used
  Where = /Volumes/iTunes Movies
  What = All My Movies
• LaCie 8TB 2Big Quadra = Time Machine.

I am just below 20% free on each of the drives and the 2TB drive is getting on in years. I am looking to purchase a 4TB D2 Quadra to replace my 3TB and then move my Movies from the 2TB to the 3TB Drive.

What I am curious is, if there is an application to clone the 3TB Drive to the 4TB Drive and completely retain the identity of the 3TB Drive so all the pointers are in place for iTunes. It was a considerable effort to spit the drives up originally and retain my library information (Added Date, play count, etc) and I do not want to have to go through that again, so if I can just clone the 3->4 and then 2->3 and iTunes not know any better (nor Time Machine if possible), I would be a happy camper.

I also looked adding another 6 or 8 TB 2Big Quadra, but I'm a fan of splitting up the library to limit the impact of a drive failure and it's cheaper to have multiple external disks.

Thank You,
Ray

RGertner said:

What I am curious is, if there is an application to clone the 3TB Drive to the 4TB Drive and completely retain the identity of the 3TB Drive so all the pointers are in place for iTunes. It was a considerable effort to spit the drives up originally and retain my library information (Added Date, play count, etc) and I do not want to have to go through that again, so if I can just clone the 3->4 and then 2->3 and iTunes not know any better (nor Time Machine if possible), I would be a happy camper.

Click to expand...

Why yes... yes there is.
Mac Backup Software - Carbon Copy Cloner

Applications like SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner will do that for you. ie. they will make an exact copy of your drive to another drive.

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
Mac Backup Software - Carbon Copy Cloner

Only thing that will be different is the name of the drive ( where the clone is stored ) but that can be easily changed afterwards.
Unless OS X has hidden pointers that I am not aware off.
Since you are cloning, and not touching your original drive, I'd say give it a go.

Time Machine will detect the difference in physical drive and perform an new full backup from your new drive.

Cheers ... McBie

Ooops .... duplicate post ... feel free to delete.

Cheers ... McBie

Thanks for the feedback on CCC. I had originally looked into that but I found some feedback from the developer to someone who was trying to do what I was planning and he indicated that it would not work, so I dismissed it. So here is what I decided to do, I purchased a new 4TB Lacie D2 Quadra yesterday and it should be here Friday. The plan is to:

1. Copy all my iTunes Media back into the default Location with the exception of Movies and TV Shows
2. SYMLINK /Movies to /Movies on the 3TB Drive
3. SYMLINK /TV Shows to /TV Shows on the 4TB Drive
4. Reset to the Default Media Folder Location
5. Select Organize and Copy into Library and select YES when iTunes asks if it should copy in based on my preferences

Using this method, iTunes should see each of my drives as local removing the need for me to manually manage the location of my media. Or at least, that's the theory

RGertner said:

Thanks for the feedback on CCC. I had originally looked into that but I found some feedback from the developer to someone who was trying to do what I was planning and he indicated that it would not work, so I dismissed it. So here is what I decided to do, I purchased a new 4TB Lacie D2 Quadra yesterday and it should be here Friday. The plan is to:

1. Copy all my iTunes Media back into the default Location with the exception of Movies and TV Shows
2. SYMLINK /Movies to /Movies on the 3TB Drive
3. SYMLINK /TV Shows to /TV Shows on the 4TB Drive
4. Reset to the Default Media Folder Location
5. Select Organize and Copy into Library and select YES when iTunes asks if it should copy in based on my preferences

Using this method, iTunes should see each of my drives as local removing the need for me to manually manage the location of my media. Or at least, that's the theory

Click to expand...

That's actually more or less how my system is set up. I have a symlink in my home folder (on an SSD) pointing to the "Music" folder that actually resides on a 2nd internal HDD. All my actual media is on yet another partition though, shared with my wife. This may only apply to internal drives, but when my HDD crashed, I copied over my media manually from a backup to the new drive and iTunes picked them up right away, if I recall correctly anyway.

You might also want to read the tip in this link:
Move Your iTunes Library to Another Hard Drive in Three Simple Steps

EDIT: you can always clone to the new drive first, then see if everything works properly with a "simple" clone before wiping the old drive for moving the other files to it.