This may happen later with my iMac, but right now it is happening for my iTunes on PC. The PC had 60GB of partition to install Windows 7, and right now it is down to about 2GB of free space. All iTunes purchases, including Music and Movies, are downloaded to
C:\Users\mike\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music
C:\Users\mike\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Movies
which will make the C:
drive have less and less free space. (and C:
will be more healthy if it has at least a couple of GB of free space). What is the safest, most proper way to migrate all the media to an external hard drive J:
? On J:
, the path might be:
J:\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music
or
J:\iTunes Media\Music
My guess is that we can change the folder in iTunes, but won't iTunes go to that folder or create it, and find nothing, and index everything wrong?
So, should an exact copy of C:\Users\mike\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media
be made as J:\iTunes Media
first (probably 30GB of files copying), and then start iTunes and change the preference for the folder to the J:
one? Is there a standard or official method to do this?
Best Answer
You're actually on to the right approach. This Apple support article details the following approach for Windows (and this is the approach for a Mac user):
If you haven't been letting iTunes keep your media organized up until now, you'll have to wait while it sorts everything out. Could take a few hours. Have beverages handy.
Once it's done sorting things out you can change the location of the iTunes library and iTunes will shuffle everything over to the new spot. From that article:
Circa iTunes 9.x I used this (nearly) same approach to move my library from my main hard drive on my iMac to my Drobo and can confirm that it works.