If you have hundreds upon hundreds of songs in your iTunes library, plus videos, films and e-books, you may find that the original hard drive you downloaded all this to is starting to fill up. Moving (or just backing up) all that data may seem difficult, but it can be pretty fast. And you can even turn a drive full of music into a server to stream tunes to all the computers and devices in your household.

Moving Your iTunes Library to an External Drive

To free up space on your computer or make a backup, just follow these simple steps within the most current version of iTunes:

1. Under the main iTunes Menu, go to Preferences and select Advanced. Tick the "Keep iTunes Media Folder Organised" box (if it isn’t already ticked).
2. Open up iTunes' Preferences and go to Advanced. Make sure both these boxes are ticked: "Keep iTunes Media Folder organised" and "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library".
3. In this same panel, click on “Change” under "iTunes Media Folder Location" and navigate to the new drive, such as Backup Plus and the folder you wish to move your iTunes data to. Click on “OK”.
4. Under the File menu, select Library, then Organise Library. Now tick the "Consolidate Files" box, and click on “OK”.

Done! Your existing iTunes Library has been moved to the new drive and any new music, videos or whatever you load into iTunes will be downloaded to the new drive as well.

You can go back to step 3 to change where your iTunes Library is stored at any time, whether to your computer or a different external drive.

Creating a Home Music Server

If you have a lot of digital music and you wish to be able to listen to it from any computer or device around your home, you may want to set up a music server. This is easier than it sounds – essentially you copy all your music to one large computer that can stream the music files to your other devices.

One of the best tools to accomplish this is a network-attached storage device such as Seagate® Central or Seagate Business Storage. You can move all your music (or videos, films and other files) to one of these drives and stream the tunes via Wi-Fi to whatever device you choose.

—By Trystan L Bass

Tag:

• entertainment,
• media storage,
• network attached storage,
• Seagate Central,
• Video Storage,
• music library,
• music storage,
• video library,
• media library,
• External hard drives