Back-up to Hard Drive

Hi there,

I would like to know how to back up my 3,900 songs to an external hard-disk I own.

I've tried dragging and dropping into a new folder but it won't react for some reason.

I could do it easily with my windows pc so why not mac?

Thanks very much,

beattie41

What format is the external hard drive in? I'm guessing its NTFS in which case you will need to reformat it to either FAT32 (Can't put any files larger than 4gb, but can be read by PC's and macs) or HFS (Any file size you want, can only be read on macs)

trpnmonkey41 is probably right, just click on the drive and go up to File, Get Info. It will tell you how it is formatted. If you aren't going to use the drive with a PC then use Disk Utility to reformat it in HFS+. If you are going to use it with a PC, then FAT32. Of course that means you are going to need to back up your back up drive, reformatting it will erase everything!

It's already in FAT32 - and I need to use it with Windows XP so will I just have to drag 4GB in at a time (18GB of music!)? No easier way to do it?

Thanks,

beattie41

The 4Gb limit is per file, not per group of files IIRC.

Right click the drive icon on the Macs desktop, select GET INFO. When the window pops up there will be an area for permissions at the bottom. Expand it and make sure you have read/write permissions on the drive itself.

Just tried again

KK, so here's what I did:

I made a new folder on my hard drive
In iTunes I pressed Select All, then dragged in to the new folder.... waited... few clicks.. then when I open the file there's nothing in it?

Anybody help me out,
Thanks

beattie41

beattie41 said:

KK, so here's what I did:

I made a new folder on my hard drive
In iTunes I pressed Select All, then dragged in to the new folder.... waited... few clicks.. then when I open the file there's nothing in it?

Anybody help me out,
Thanks

beattie41

Click to expand...

That won't work. You need to copy the actual files themselves from wherever they are on your hard drive to the folder on the other hard drive.

try moving the folder from Your User Name/Music/iTunes into the external drive

Copy it or completely move it?

just move it. moving from internal to external drives automatically copies it.

internal to internal and external to external automatically moves

Nice one man... thanks a lot.