Question

How to auto sync my mac itunes library with my backup hard drive

Asked by: furio311

I have a mac with a ton of music on it.  I HAVE backed it up to an external hard drive.  How do I get it to auto sync the backup.  If I purchase a new song, I don't want to have to go in and add each new purchase to my backup

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Asked On
2009-11-02 at 17:55:16ID24865921
Tags

itunes

,

backup

,

mac

,

backup hard drive

Topics

iTunes Software

,

Snow Leopard (OS 10.6)

,

Removable Backup Media

,

Apple Operating Systems

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
9

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Answers

 

by: maximus5328Posted on 2009-11-02 at 18:42:43ID: 25725690

If you are running 10.5 Leopard or 10.6 Snow Leopard then Time Machine (built-in backup utility) will do this for you.

 

by: furio311Posted on 2009-11-02 at 19:29:31ID: 25725850

Yes that is true, I have a time machine, but I wanted it backed up to a seperate external hard drive as well.  I have over 120gb of stuff in my itunes library, and I don't trust time machine enough to solely rely on that.

 

by: maximus5328Posted on 2009-11-02 at 20:11:16ID: 25725989

Is this second hard drive constantly connected to your computer or you connected as needed?

 

by: furio311Posted on 2009-11-02 at 20:28:12ID: 25726057

right now it is connected constantly, but once I finish cleaning up and putting all my cd's on my mac, I will move on to dvd's which I have another backup external drive for.

 

by: maximus5328Posted on 2009-11-02 at 20:31:05ID: 25726061

The reason I was asking that is because there is a simple command that you can manually run when you connect that drive - that will do the syncing. So the solution will be semi-automatic.

 

by: furio311Posted on 2009-11-02 at 21:29:47ID: 25726264

and that command would be?

 

by: maximus5328Posted on 2009-11-03 at 05:12:33ID: 25728547

rsync -aE <source folder> <destination folder>
option -a means that all possible file information is preserved (owner, permissions, etc.)
option -E preserves file forks - important on a Mac

example:
rsync -aE /Users/username/Music/iTunes  /Volumes/backupdrive/iTunes

please note that there are no trailing / after iTunes - instructs rsync to sync starting with the folder itself. also this variant will not delete files from your backup drive even if they are gone from iTunes.
in order to sync deletes as well option --delete can be added, like this:

rsync -aE --delete /Users/username/Music/iTunes  /Volumes/backupdrive/iTunes

 

by: jlg89Posted on 2009-11-03 at 08:53:04ID: 25730931

http://www.decimus.net/

Get Synk. Fantastic app, well worth the reasonable cost.

 

by: furio311Posted on 2009-11-06 at 23:17:37ID: 31649203

...

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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