Music files are similar to any other computer file in terms of their susceptibility to being deleted and being damaged. It's not uncommon for a computer hard drive to pack in and stop working or for computers to be stolen. If you do not have a back up of your music and iTunes archive then you run the risk of losing all your music. It should be noted that there are programs on the market that allow you to retrieve the music from your iPod and copy it back onto your computer (that is beyond the scope of this article) but if you have more music on your computer than you do on your iPod then that music will be lost. Backing up your archive is an essential way of reducing the heart ache and time associated with lost music.
If you want to back up your iTunes properly it is not a simple matter of just making sure you have copied the actual song files as there is more to your iTunes folder than just the song files (playlists, preferences and artwork for example). If you are not sure where your iTunes folder is, it can be found in your 'home folder > Music' if you are using a Mac or in 'Home folder > My Music' if using a PC. The best way to back up your music is to copy the whole folder on to an external hard drive or onto a CD/DVD. Some people choose to back their music up into a separate folder on their computer but this is not such a great idea as if your hard drive crashes or your computer is stolen you will lose both the original and back up files which results in no more music and an upset you!
The easiest and probably the most convenient way would be to back the music up onto an external hard drive. External hard drives come in many shapes and sizes. Nowadays external hard drives are cheap to purchase and you can easily pick one up at a reasonable price. The good thing about backing your music up onto an external hard drive is that you can do it all at once, it is simple to do and restoring your lost library is easy.
If you ever need to restore your lost library then you would need to open iTunes Preferences and check both the boxes that relate to the iTunes folder which are found in the advanced pane. You would then need to come out of iTunes and drag the entire back up iTunes folder from the external hard drive to it's original location (as mentioned earlier). Now start iTunes again and you should find that all your preferences and playlists etc should have been restored.
Back ups are only useful if you keep them updated. There is no point in making back ups of your iTunes folder every 2 months if you add music to it every week. That would be a lot of music added to iTunes in between back ups. I would suggest making a back up of your folder often (every week or couple of weeks, it all depends on how often you add music) by dragging the folder onto your hard drive and replacing the previous backup
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