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Question

Moving Itunes to my external drive

Jan 31, 2015 6:35PM PST

Because my Itunes is clogging up a load of memory on my PC, I have transfered the itunes file to my attached external Edrive. Not knowing to much about this I thought just changing the desktop icon to Edrive would work, but obviously it does not.
Any suggestions?

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Re: moving iTunes
Jan 31, 2015 7:47PM PST

"Moving iTunes" can mean 3 things:
1. You moved the program from c:\Program Files to your external drive.
2. You moved the library from your Windows profile to your external drive.
3. You moved the media (mp3's, movies, etc) from whereever they are to your external drive.

- If you moved the program, the shortcut pointing to it will not work any more.
- If you moved the library, iTines - when run - will make a new one.
- If you moved the media, the library now points to files that no longer exist.

I suppose it's #3. Then the easiest thing to do is to rebuilt the library, I think, so it points to the new location of the files. But there might be more to it, especially if it's content you bought from Apple and is protected by DRM.

By the way, do you realise that external drivers are less reliable than internal drives? So the need to have a backup of all media that you dont want to lose in case something happens (like the drive fails, or stolen, or ransomware encrypts everything, or you delete a file accidentally) is even more pressing. Be sure to have 2 copies on different media; together with the original this makes three.

Kees

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UPDATE to my problem
Feb 2, 2015 12:53AM PST

Thanks for your advice, I actually mainly use the PC for Engineering drawing work, hence I daily back up to an external hard drive, then back that up onto another.
With regard to my problem I now have iTunes working directly from my external drive, possibly more by luck than design. In the end I had so many iTune files all over the place I Isolated iTunes library Genius.itdb and left that solely on the external drive. I then deleted everything to do with iTunes from the C drive on my PC and reloaded a new program onto the external drive. When it stated it could not find the library I just put the existing old library file into the new file name box on the screen and hey presto it worked.
Thanks again for your assistance.

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Answer
Of course a quick Google search would have saved you
Feb 1, 2015 3:40AM PST