Newbie needs help!

Hi all,

I just bought a 1TB external HD and Time Machine is currently backing up my HD. I have a couple questions regarding Time Machine and other related issues.

The reason I bought the external HD was my internal HD was about at capacity (only 950 or so MB left). What I want to do is move all my media to the external, but be able to just click a song in iTunes and have it play as it does now. Is this possible? I just want my external to house all media, and be able to delete most from my internal, but still have the ease of use as I do now with everything on my internal. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Jay

If you're like most people, your iTunes and iPhoto libraries are the main culprits of where all your HD space has gone. Well, that and porn.

It's REALLY important that you free up more disk space ASAP. You're probably already noticing the slow performance, but eventually you'll corrupt the directory and lose data keeping that small an amount of "elbow room" available. Mac OS X likes *lots* of elbow room. My usual guidelines for recent Macs is to keep at least 12GB free at all times.

Anyway, iTunes and iPhoto both let you keep a) multiple libraries and b) anywhere you want. It's easy and it works well. I keep a smaller "favourites" music library ON my portable and the rest in a separate library on an external drive I can access easily when I want it by simply remembering to hold the option key when launching iTunes, then picking the desired library. In fact, with this system I've gotten in the habit of ALWAYS launching iTunes with the option key down so that I never accidentally ask for the wrong library.

Likewise, you can do the same with iPhoto (though if you're trying to break up an existing library, that's more complicated).

Instructions for iTunes can be found here. If you want to know more about the iPhoto idea, just let me know.

I have my music and other content on a Time Capsule so it is available no matter which Mac I am on. I used to forget to mount things when iTunes launched so it would complain. I finally did something in Automator that mounted the drive before iTunes launched.