Need help with my new hard drive

I just bought a Iomega Blackbelt Edition 1TB External Hard Drive. I want to put all my songs and photos onto the hard drive. How can I do this to free space on my computer?

Here is how to move all of your photos in iPhoto onto your external hard drive, while saving how they are organized:
10014: Export iPhoto Folders to Back Up Drive

Moving all of your music in iTunes onto your external hard drive is much easier. Just drag the iTunes folder onto the icon for your external hard drive, This is the path to that folder:

This is how you get there:
[hard drive icon] --> Users folder --> [your user name] --> Music --> iTunes folder

(More technically, the path is: ~/Music/iTunes folder)

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Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting
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okay so should i use time machine to back everything up?

clarke525 said:

okay so should i use time machine to back everything up?

Click to expand...

It would be better just in case you do not loose anything ;D

Okay, but sooner or later my first back up will get deleted right? What happens if I need files from that first back up? And also can I secure my harddrive with a password?

Time Machine backups are incremental. And as long as the drive you're using to backup to is large enough, you shouldn't have to worry about filling it up any time soon.

And password protecting a hard drive is a good way to lose all your data when you forget the password. My advice, don't do it unless you're storing Atomic Secrets on the drive.

clarke525 said:

Okay, but sooner or later my first back up will get deleted right? What happens if I need files from that first back up? And also can I secure my harddrive with a password?

Click to expand...

As long as your backup hard drive is at least as big, or bigger, than the drive you are backing up, you will *never* have any files deleted so that they are completely gone.

The way that Time Machine works is that when the backup drive becomes full (assuming that it is as large, or larger than the drive you are backing up), and you go to backup more recent versions of files that already exist on the backup drive, the only thing that it ever deletes is older versions of those same files. It never deletes the most recent versions of files on your hard drive.

Files on your backup drive that have never changed (or been deleted from the drive you are backing up) are also never deleted.

Users think that as a file ages it becomes more likely that it will be deleted by Time Machine, and that simply isn't true. Only older versions of files for which newer versions have been backed up are candidates for deletion as they age.

___________________________________________

Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting
___________________________________________

Okay. I understand this so far. Another question. I am running out of space on my computer. What do I do with everything that is taking up space? Do I delete it and depend on my harddrive?