Inspirational Technology

Backing up an iTunes Library

As I've been ripping my CD collection (1,000 ripped so far, about 1,500 still to go) and downloading from eMusic I've built a quite large library of music. This represents way too many hours of time to reproduce so it's pretty critical to back it up. I've struggled with this issue for a long time and have been mainly relying on multiple hard drives to handle backup duties. This is actually the most cost effective mechanism, but at the rate I'm consuming disk space it's also problematic. I'm currently up to about 100GB of data and will probably consume another 150GB before I'm done with my CD collection. I'm also uncomfortable with having everything tied to the one machine. So I finally broke down and bought a DVD burner so that I can have a portable non-HD based backup. I picked up a Pioneer DVR-105 at Frys for $179, this is basically the same drive as what Apple calls the Superdrive and will work with iDVD if installed internally in the machine. I don't really care about iDVD, but it's nice to have it available.

Tonight I started the process of backing everything up. I figure it will take about 23 discs to handle the current data and then I'll add discs as necessary going forward. I'm looking at doing the backups in iTunes and the process I'm using seems to work fairly well. Here's the process as it stands.

• Create an empty playlist
• Add the entire library to the playlist (just drag the Library icon)
• Set Preferences/Burning/Disc Format to Data CD or DVD
• Use a blank DVD-R and tell iTunes to burn the playlist.
• iTunes asks if you want to burn it as a data DVD which you do.
• ITunes then tells you the entire playlist won't fit and asks if you just want to burn the part that will. So yes.
• When the disc is done iTunes automatically mounts it and switches the view to the disc.
• Find out how many tracks burned on the disc.
• Go back to the backup playlist and select the first track in the list.
• Scroll until you find the number of the last track that was burned. This will be the same as the number of tracks on the disc.
• Hold down shift and click that track.
• Hit delete to remove all selected tracks from the playlist.
• Burn another DVD and repeat the process until all the tracks are gone.

For ongoing backups I'm planning to leverage iTunes smart playlists by creating a smart playlist that shows all tracks added since the date of the last backup. Using that playlist I'll then use the procedure I outlined above. After each backup I'll just update the date on the smart playlist. I'll probably do this about once per month and rely on HD backup during that period.

I figured this is a much easier way then trying to backup from the file system directly. The problem is spanning discs and keeping track of where you are in the process. It will also be kind of a pain going forward as you add more tracks

Hopefully this will work fairly well. The one thing I'm a little concerned about is restoring the discs. The files are written to the discs in a flat manner, rather then using the directory based mechanism iTunes usually uses. What I figured I'd do was just reimport the files off the DVD into iTunes. This is the one problem with these discs though, as I'm pretty sure it will import the file as a new record in the iTunes database. This means you'll lose all the existing metadata that is associated with that song. This is one advantage to just backing up the files from the file system directly.

Does anyone know of a better way to handle this kind of thing without resorting to a backup program like Retrospect?