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Yet another way to migrate an iTunes collection to another drive
Authored by: jschaffe on Jun 18, '08 08:50:25AM

Early on, I used the iTunes Consolidate feature to move my library to a dedicated drive (a second internal drive in my PowerMac G5, but it could be an external drive as well). Recently, I needed to move to a larger drive.

I:

1) Quit iTunes
2) Renamed my second internal hard drive, where the iTunes Library is located, from "Music HD" to "Old Music HD"
3) Attached the new hard drive in an external case
4) Formatted the new drive and named it "New Music HD"
5) Used SuperDuper to clone from "Old Music HD" to "New Music HD"
6) Used the Toast Utilities->Compare menu to verify the new copy (took hours, but I wanted to be sure!)
7) Ejected "Old Music HD" from the desk top
8) Renamed "New Music HD" to "Music HD"
9) Started iTunes and test-played a bunch of songs
10) Shut down the Mac, removed the old second internal hard drive and installed the new one
11) Restarted the Mac and again verified that it could play my music
12) Kept the old drive as a back up for a while

This seemed to work quite well without reimporting anything and all my data (play count, etc.) remains intact.

I'm not familiar with the "inodes" issue, although I'm guessing it refers to something in the file system. Since the iTunes library stores full path names, I don't see how that could be a risk with my method, though.

Jeff



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Yet another way to migrate an iTunes collection to another drive
Authored by: schneb on Jun 23, '08 12:18:23PM
I'm not familiar with the "inodes" issue, although I'm guessing it refers to something in the file system.

You are correct, Jeff, it is something within the file system. This method indeed seemed to work fine with music only. However, add videos to the mix, and that is where you run in to problems. Keep them in the same place? All is well. Change the name of a folder, or move them, and iTunes will NOT track the change and the links will be broken.

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