.Mac Backup 3, iTunes 6, and purchased videos

Oct 18, '05 06:16:00AM

Contributed by: barrysharp

Apple's BackUp 3 (BU3 for short; part of .Mac) provides a nifty 'plan' (a BU3 term) called Purchased Music for backing up iTunes purchased music. And with the introduction of iTunes 6, one can now purchase video content such as music videos and TV programs/video.

So what's my point here? Well the BU3 Purchased Music plan selects all purchased content files, which will now include video files. If you're like me, I've been backing up my Purchased Music to my .Mac iDisk for safe keeping. Today when my scheduled Purchase Music backup Plan ran, it failed because it choked on insufficient space on my iDisk. This was not good, and I wasn't happy at all. So, what to do. Well there are probably several way to fix this, but here's what I did.

The iTunes purchased music files have a .m4p suffix, and the video files have a .m4v suffix. Noting this, I first renamed this file...

/Library -> Application Support -> Backup -> QuickPicks -> com.apple.iTunes.PurchasedMusic.quickpick -> [Control-click and Show Package Contents] -> Contents -> Versions -> 1.0 -> Resources -> DefinitionPlist.strings

...by adding a .ORIG suffix, and then made a copy of it using its original name. I then used vi to edit out this string:

or (node.name.pathExtension = 'm4v')
Now I re-ran my BU3 Purchased Music backup plan, and it ran successfully because the purchased video files weren't being selected. BTW, I had purchased Desperate Housewifes, Pixar's For the Birds, and a few music videos. These all added up to some 750 MB.

I believe Apple needs to re-work their Purchased Music plan with the introduction of iTunes 6. Quite likely they need to add a "Purchased Videos" plan as an option. Maybe I'll create this one for myself, or if someone else gets to it first, then maybe they can post it back here for the rest of us, as I believe it's really needed now.

BTW, I first tried to de-select these *.m4v files in BU3's template Purchased Music Plan, but I wasn't able to accomplish it. This plan has the "iTunes purchased music" Quickpick present, and presumably the trick was to somehow also exclude the .m4v files down in the iTunes Music folder. I did try selecting "+" and deselecting them, but BU3 seemed to be confused about what it was I was trying to do. So I gave up and went about modifying the Quickpick file as described above.

Hope this warns others about iTunes 6->Purchased Videos->BU3 impacts especially if backing up to iDisk->Backup.

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