Relocating the iTunes Music Library

Q: I love iTunes, but I have a lot of music and it’s taking over my disk space. Can I keep my music on an external drive without re-importing it to iTunes every time I listen to it?

A: Yes, you can. Disk space can be particularly vexing for laptop users, so it’s always nice to find that something that takes up a lot of space, like an extensive music collection, can be moved off-board.

We’ll talk about how to move the music library in a moment, but there are some considerations you should take before deciding to relocate your iTunes Music folder.

First, you’ll want to be careful if you put your iTunes library in the same place that you store your backups. If you have an external drive that is a bootable backup of your computer, you could lose all of your music by over-writing it the next time you make a full backup. This is less of a concern if your backup is stored in a directory or partition on an external drive, and your music is stored in a separate directory or partition.

Next, you should consider whether you will always be connected to the drive when you want your music. This seems like a no-brainer, but it could come as quite a surprise the first time you open up iTunes while away from your external drive and discover that all of your music is “gone!” Since iTunes will look and act exactly the same as it did before you moved where the music lives, it’ll be easy to forget that it’s no longer on your computer!

If you know you’ve got a safe place to store your music files and you don’t think you’ll need them when the drive is not connected to your computer, you can follow Apple’s instructions for relocating the iTunes Library found here.

All of the instructions should be followed completely to ensure that your music is safe and iTunes doesn’t start behaving oddly when you’re done. With that said, there are a few things in particular to keep in mind while you follow along:

• Make sure your music is backed up somewhere before you start. It should be ok, but it’s a good idea to always make a backup before you start moving around or changing any large amounts of data you don’t want to lose!
• Pay close attention to Apple’s instruction number 5 in the second half of their tutorial. This is where you choose a new location for the iTunes Music folder: make sure you change it to a location on the external drive before you start moving music around, or you’ll just be copying all the music onto a new location on your computer.
• Step number 12 is also important. Not only will you need to be sure that there’s enough disk space in the new location for all of your music, you’ll also want to be cognizant of the fact that this step could take awhile if you have a lot of music. Try not to start this procedure when you’re in a hurry, because you’ll want to let this step finish without interruption.
  • If you do get interrupted, don’t sweat it. This step simply copies the music without deleting in from the old location. If you need to start over, just delete the new iTunes Music folder from your new location (not the old folder!) and start over from the beginning of the instructions.
• Before you do Apple’s step 13 (deleting the old iTunes Music folder), make sure that it has successfully copied to your new location. You’d hate to delete this folder and then learn that it wasn’t copied correctly!

After you complete Apple’s steps, your music should be happily living in its new location and you should have much more free space on your computer’s drive. Success!

Your Windows-using friends may be jealous of your newfound wealth of disk space, but luckily this is a solution you can share with them. Simply point them to the Windows version of the tutorial on Apple’s site, and they’ll be guided through the steps needed to accomplish the same thing in Windows.