It's really easy to quickly outgrow your internal drive if you've got a substantial iTunes library. And, with all that metadata involved, the last thing you want to do is lose your ratings, comments, whatever.
Don't despair. It's actually really easy to move your iTunes library with iTunes itself. That's right: no Finder, no SuperDuper!, no nothing. And iTunes takes care of all the details!
Here's how:
Make sure the drive you want to put the library on is connected. The drive can be a network volume, local volumes, whatever -- just make sure it's mounted and ready to go.
Open iTunes and choose iTunes > Preferences. In the Advanced tab, choose the new location for the library.
At this point, you could stop, and all future music/movies/whatever you add to iTunes will be stored in the new location: in essence, your library will be on more then one drive, and you can repeat the above as the new location fills as well.
But, if you want to move your existing music and videos into the new location:
- Choose Advanced > Consolidate Library. iTunes will copy all of the music from all the various previous locations into the new library location you selected above.
When it's done, make sure you're happy with what you've got. You can then delete the old iTunes Music folder in ~/Music/iTunes. But don't delete the iTunes Library or itunes Music Library.xml files: those must remain where they are.
When the new Airport Extreme Base Station came out, I was happy to see that it had some support for attached USB drives. It's a reasonable (though not perfect) way to share data in a home/SOHO situation, and I figured people would be using it to back up with SuperDuper! So -- to help out...
General Comments
A few things to point out right off the bat:
As you've likely seen elsewhere, the Airport Disks are not fast. Don't expect blazing speeds: wired, I've seen a maximum of about 1.5MB/s.
The AEBS gets very, very cranky if you get to a disk full situation. I've seen it crash more than once. Don't do that.
Remember that HFS+ drives are made available through AFP, and FAT32 through SMB.
Don't format any drives you're going to use with SuperDuper! as FAT32: use HFS+ (and partition properly for the Mac processor type you're using -- GUID for Intel, Apple Partition Map for Power PC).
Make sure to connect a power supply to the drive.
As general advice, please don't cheap out when you get an external drive. Really. Get one with a real Oxford chipset, USB/FireWire if possible in case you want to attach it directly to your Mac.
Don't expect miracles. This is an inexpensive solution, and it behaves like one. If you want a real NAS, I suggest an Infrant ReadyNAS NV+: it's faster, redundant, recoverable. I'll have another post about the ReadyNAS soon.
Remember, this is a first generation ("Rev A") product. It's likely to go through teething pains. Don't rely on them as your only backup!
Using Airport Disks with SuperDuper!
You'll note that your Airport Disks don't show up in the SuperDuper! pop-ups. This is by design: we can't currently copy directly to or from a network volume due to authentication/permission/metadata issues.
Instead, you'll follow the steps in Backing up over a network in the SuperDuper! User's Guide (Help > User's Guide), and back up to a read/write sparse image stored on the Airport Disk.
We often get asked why SuperDuper! can't back up directly to a network volume. What most people don't realize is that, for security reasons, you can't directly authenticate as "root" over a network, and that means it's not possible to store files with system ownership on a network drive.
An image, on the other hand, acts as a "local drive", and can be authenticated against, even though it's stored remotely. This ensures that your files are backed up with full fidelity, including proper ownership and permissions. And since it's formatted as HFS+, it avoids various situations that can ensue trying to emulate HFS+ semantics and metadata storage on a non-HFS+ drive, while still storing in a native, non-proprietary, Mac-native format.
I'd suggest doing your first full backup directly to the USB drive, rather than over the network. This'll be a lot faster. You can then connect the drive to the base station, and re-select the image using the "Disk Image..." choice in SuperDuper!'s destination drive pop-up. (Note that although the image will be grey, you can still pick it, and ignore the "overwrite" warning. Yes, I know that UI sucks.)
That should do it: enjoy the base station!
