can you do a back up copy of I-Tunes music ?

pennymakespounds

Have got my 1000 songs on I Tunes which is on my desktop computer .. but makes me wonder .. what if computer dies , was stolen etc ?
I back up all my Excel / word files regular on a usb stick ... can i backup / copy all the I-Tunes ?

Did try the other day to drag & drop the icon as i do with excel files etc onto stick . but it just showed as "shortcut" ?

At that point .. confused...unsure...so straight here to ask the experts !!

Thanks in advance.

tronator

pennymakespounds wrote: »

Have got my 1000 songs on I Tunes which is on my desktop computer .. but makes me wonder .. what if computer dies , was stolen etc ?
I back up all my Excel / word files regular on a usb stick ... can i backup / copy all the I-Tunes ?

Did try the other day to drag & drop the icon as i do with excel files etc onto stick . but it just showed as "shortcut" ?

Did you try to drag and drop the files out of the iTunes program? This might not work. You need to backup your music on filesystem level. There must be a itunes folder somewhere in your userprofile. Go to Start -> Run and type in

%USERPROFILE%

and hit RETURN.

Somewhere there should be a folder "itunes music" or similar, maybe in the subfolder "My Music". I'm not using iTunes, so i'm not completely sure where to find it.

buyitall

It should be called 'itunes music', inside 'itunes', inside 'my music'. At least, that's where it is in mine.

googler

Usually, unless you've specified anything different, iTunes will put the library into the 'My Music' folder.

You can copy the library from here to a backup location, but you should probably research methods of restoring it too.... there's plenty of guides online, suggest googling it with "restore itunes backup" or similar....

How did you get the songs onto iTunes in the first place? If you loaded them all from your CDs, then you have a backup already.

nomoreheroes

Open itunes, file, library, back up to disc. Simple.

pennymakespounds

nomoreheroes......easy to get too ... but how many discs is it going to need to back up nearly 1000 tunes ?

The_Grandmaster

maybe better to get an external harddrive

nomoreheroes

pennymakespounds wrote: »

nomoreheroes......easy to get too ... but how many discs is it going to need to back up nearly 1000 tunes ?

Well a DVD holds 4.7 GB so maybe 2 or 3 DVD's worth.

pennymakespounds

can it be done to a usb stick ?

turbobob

A big USB stick yes. Flash memory is more expensive per Gb than hard disk space though. A 32gb flash drive can be had for just over £40 on Ebuyer. You can buy a 500gb external drive (over 15x the storage) for around the same price. If you find out how much space your music folder takes up (right click it, choose properties) that will give you an indication of what storage you need to buy. I think flash memory is not a great backup medium anyway because it can be prone to failure.