How to backup your iTunes library

According to this discussion, the Finder and enough hard disk space is all you need to perform a backup of your iTunes library.

For this post, I’ll assume that you’ve let iTunes manage all your music files, which means that all your music data is located in the iTunes folder. To find out how iTunes manages your music folder organization (or not), simply launch iTunes, open up Preferences and navigate to the Advanced tab. You should see the following:

Incidentally, this tab also shows you the physical location of your iTunes library. Make a note of this.

Here’s how I’d proceed with the backup.

Find out how big your iTunes library is

Open the Finder and change to icon view mode. The icon view mode presents information in an easy to read fashion for this purpose.

If your sidebar has the Music folder icon there, click once on it. Otherwise, locate your Music folder by clicking on your Home icon (that’s the icon with your machine’s name on it) and navigate your folder structure until you find the Music folder.

Open the Music folder and highlight the iTunes folder by clicking once on it.

Then, show the Info window by pressing cmd + i, or select File > Get Info from the menu, or right-click (control + left-click) on the folder and select Get Info from the contextual menu:

Copy the entire iTunes folder

In my example, I have about 8.45 GB of music files and iTunes meta / database data. Rounding it up, I’ll need about 10 GB of space on the target media (say, an external drive) to copy the entire folder into.

That’s all you need. Connect an external drive to your machine, and use the Finder window to copy the entire folder into the destination disk.

To restore the files to your machine (or another), simply drag the entire iTunes folder from your backup drive into the Music folder on the computer.

Tags: iTunes