New person, silly external hd question?

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Hello! I'm new to these forums.. I've had my MacBook for 4 years as my main computer source. I basically only use it for internet/music & pictures. Well, it is finally slowing down, so I decided to purchase an external hard drive and put everything on that, rather than having it on my Mac hard drive, per suggestion. I don't know very much about computers, I guess. I chose to get a Western Digital My Passport, already formatted for Macs. It is USB powered, and once connected, I chose to use Time Machine to back it up.

Well.. my intention was to put all my pictures, videos, movies, and music on the external hd and then wipe my laptop completely and reinstall my osx (which is currently Leopard). So, I copied all my music and movies/videos to the external to test that it works.. the movies played so I decided to delete all my music from my computer at that point, but now Itunes isn't working :(. I already changed the preferences to using the externals itunes folder.

How do I do what my intention was to do? Did I already screw up? lol

Sorry if there is too much useless information, I have a bad habit of doing that. Thanks in advanced to anyone who decides to try and help me. :)
<3
 
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Your Mac's Specs
09 MBP 8GB ram 500GB HD OS 10.9 32B iPad 4 32GB iPhone 5 iOs7 2TB TC Apple TV3
Time Machine is a backup of your system not designed to play from it you can restore
what is missing or corrupted from it . I would get a separate drive preferable a FW800
or a networking drive and load your media on it if you want to view and play and leave Time Macine drive strictly for that purpose.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Currently 13" Late 2010 MBA, 4GB/128GB; Early 2011 13" MBP, dual core i7 2.7ghz, 4gb ram, 500gb hd
Also remember that having your data in one location, even if it's a "backup" drive is not a backup. It's external storage. Your data is still stored on a single point of failure. A backup is designed to spread the risk out over multiple points of failure with the assumption that not all of them are going to fail simultaneously.
 

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