External Drive

How to Move Your iTunes Library to an External Drive

Move or back up your iTunes Library in four, fast steps

Table of Contents:

With macOS, take advantage of built-in backup for your music, videos, movies, and eBooks.

If you have hundreds or even thousands of songs, videos, movies, and eBooks in your iTunes* library, you may find that the original hard drive you used to download all this content is now starting to fill up. Moving (or backing up) all that data may seem difficult, but it’s actually very fast and easy. You can even turn a hard drive full of music into a server to stream tunes to all the computers and devices in your household.

Move 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. From the main iTunes menu, go to iTunes > Preferences then click Advanced. Check these boxes:

Keep iTunes Media Folder organized

Copy files to iTunes Media Folder when adding to library

2. Also in the Advanced Preferences windows, click Change.

3. From the iTunes Media Folder Location windows, navigate to the new drive (Backup Plus for example). Select where you want to move your iTunes data then click OK.

4. From the File menu, go to Library > Organize Library. Check Consolidate FilesOK.

Your existing iTunes Library will be moved to the new drive and any new music, videos, or whatever you have in iTunes will be backed up to the new drive as well. Please keep in mind that you can go back to step 2 and change where your iTunes Library is stored—to your computer or a different external drive— at any time.

Creating a Home Music Server

If you have a lot of digital music and you want 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 Synology DiskStation DS115j with Seagate® Barracuda® Pro drives. You can move all your music (or videos, movies, and other files) to one of these NAS systems, and stream them via Wi-Fi to whatever device you choose.

*Note: iTunes is an Apple product. For help using iTunes, please see Apple support.