Backing up itunes?

Hey guys, I am finished importing and labelling all of my folders in itunes, appreciate all of the help from everyone, thanks! Moving on, next issue for me, I would like to know how to backup itunes? To clarify, I imported my folders of music into itunes on my windows desktop pc, now I wish to back up itunes somehow so if my pc should crash I can easily reinstall the itunes software on my repaired or on a new pc and still be able to see the folders I had created as they were? Now I read through the instructions here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1751

but I am not clear on which instruction I should use for my situation and purpose?

The easiest way would be to simply drag your iTunes folder to an external hard drive. If your PC crsahes and you lose the iTunes application, just re-download that from Apple and then drag your iTunes folder back to your computer.

I am not understanding what you mean by itunes "folder", can you clarify please? I have my external HDD connected to my windows pc.

At first I didn't understand what was confusing about that article but thinking about it I do now. How you back things up depends upon where your content is stored.

If you have gone into the iTunes preference settings and told it to it to copy content to the iTunes media folder you can simple follow the directions for copying the files to an external hard drive. If you prefer not to have iTunes copy songs, movies, etc. to the iTunes Media folder then you are going to need to know where those files are and back them up separately.

If you did not click those two preferences then you will also want to copy the database that tells iTunes about playlusts you've created.This help article gives the default location for those files.

Edit: Look at the help article I linked to in this post. It gives the default iTunes folder locations for various versionns of Windows and for OS X. Your last post went up while I was typing.

Slydude said:

If you did not click those two preferences then you will also want to copy the database that tells iTunes about playlusts you've created.This help article gives the default location for those files.

Click to expand...

YES, that is what I need to backup the playlists files, not my mp3's, you guys always seems to word my needs better than I can, sorry. Will look into your link, get back here, thanks.

Ok, done, I have copied both files itunes library and itunes music library to my external back up drive, will that do it?

That should do it. If you are storing content outside of the iTunes folder make sure you have some kind of plan in place to back that up. It will come in handy should you ever need to reload content. I've had to do that several times this summer due to my own errors and discovered that my backup was not complete.

Slydude said:

If you are storing content outside of the iTunes folder make sure you have some kind of plan in place to back that up.

Click to expand...

Sorry, this I am not following, again, I guess it's because I am used to DJ softwares working a certain maybe opposite of itunes? For example, my main music playback software has a library and playlist file which you can back up and when you should need to restore, it has a "relink" option which you can use to relink the library or playlist files to the mp3's on your HDD. I was thinking this would be the same situation with itunes? That I would reinstall itunes and replace the 2 files in the itunes folder with the 2 I had copied onto my external HDD, restart itunes and my playlists should all be there ready to play, is this not the case?