Transferring Large Music Collection to New External Hard Drive & Synching with iTunes

Greetings. I have an exceptionally large music collection. My goal is to upload it all to 16TB external drive on a RAID 1 setting (to safeguard against losing it). Here's where I could use help:
I need to transfer the music I currently have on a 2TB external drive to the larger one then synch the larger hard drive to my iTunes library. I could use a step-by-step tutorial on how to go about this properly. The last time I tried this, I lost all the music on my last hard drive and had to start over. My 16TB drive is a G-Raid, and I am using a late 2012 iMac with Version 10.11.6 El Capitan. Any help appreciated. FD

There are different ways to do this. One way would be to simply copy the media files to the new drive, plug it in to the new system, start with a fresh iTunes install, and then point iTunes to the drive and let it "find" all of the media files. Be sure to NOT have iTunes configured to manage the file locations or it will try copying them all to the internal drive.

Ember1205 said:

There are different ways to do this. One way would be to simply copy the media files to the new drive, plug it in to the new system, start with a fresh iTunes install, and then point iTunes to the drive and let it "find" all of the media files. Be sure to NOT have iTunes configured to manage the file locations or it will try copying them all to the internal drive.

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Thank you! You make it sound very easy. In order to start with a fresh iTunes install, I have to uninstall iTunes, right? Not sure how to do that. Also, how do I configure iTunes to not manage the file locations before I point iTunes to the location? I'm sorry that I'm so useless. Again, appreciate the help.

Ember,

One more (possibly idiotic) question. I've copied my music from the smaller to the larger drive. Is it possible to just eject the smaller drive and re-route the iTunes path to the name of the larger drive? Thank you again.

While it is certainly "possible" to redirect where iTunes "looks" for content, your best bet would be to have a linked path / alias / specific mount point for the drive. That way, keeping the folder structure the same would mean -no changes- required.

iTunes keeps track of all of your media in a little "database" file. It has information on the file, artist, size, album, etc. (all the stuff you see in the iTunes listings), but it also contains path information for where it lives on your system as well as the name of the file that contains that song/movie/whatever. If, after copying the raw data, the data is still available in the exact same location, then you wouldn't need to change a thing.

Ember,

How would I go about doing this: "start with a fresh iTunes install, and then point iTunes to the drive and let it "find" all of the media files"? I've never done anything like that before. Thank you.

Launch iTunes, open Preferences, and go to the Advanced tab. The top box will show you where your installation of iTunes is keeping your Library. Typically, you will have that database file I mentioned earlier located in ~/Music/iTunes (it's called "iTunes Library.itl"). If you shut down iTunes, rename that file ("iTunes Library.old") and then launch iTunes again, it will build a new file with "no data" since it will no longer have any point of reference to work from. At that point, choose File -> Add to Library, browse to the top-level folder that holds your media, select the folder, and hit OK.

Ember1205,

I followed your directions, and I'm good to go. Thank you! Quick question: Should I delete the "iTunes Library.old" file I created, or is it worth keeping? Really appreciate the assist.

The file itself shouldn't be very large. Holding on to it for a little while until you're sure you have "everything" accounted for wouldn't hurt.

Glad you're up and running.