It's a fact: as your iTunes collection gets bigger, the amount of free space on your drive gets smaller. Sure, you could stuff your computer's internal drive to the gills with as much media as you can jam in there, but as Macs require a reasonable chunk of drive real estate to keep on puttering along in a trouble-free fashion, we'd advise against this storage strategy. What to do?
You could buy a larger internal drive for a little more breathing room. Or, you could bite a bullet and delete a few thousand files from your enormous collection of music, movies and television shows, but that's a pretty extreme fix. If neither of these solutions appeal to you, how about transferring part of your iTunes library to a spare external drive that you've got laying around? Yeah, that's the ticket! Here's how to do it.
1: You Gotta Keep 'Em Separated
The first order of business is deciding where your files will reside. For this tutorial, we've opted to leave our audio files on one drive and move all of the video files in our library to a new location -- in this case, an external drive.
A word to the wise: you've no doubt invested a lot of time and money into your iTunes library, and will want to ensure its safety. While you might have had a backup plan for the files residing on your Mac's internal drive, computer users often neglect to backup the information they keep on their external drives. Given Apple's current policy to only allow an item to be downloaded from the iTunes Music Store once, be sure that you have a contingency plan for your date before proceeding any further with this tutorial.
2: Give them a Home
Create a folder on the new external drive, and title it something clever like iTunes or iTunes Video. This will help you keep things organized should you ever decide to use the drive for anything other than storing your video files. Then, drag your Television and Movies folders to the new location. At this point, the file transfer should begin.
If you have a large library like we do, you might want to go make a sandwich -- this is going to take a while.
3: Do a Little Spring Cleaning
When OS X moves files on to an external drive, it is not a true transfer, but rather a duplication of those files. That means that while your movie and video files now reside on an external drive, they're also still kicking back in their original locationm too. To remedy this, open iTunes, and navigate to the Movies pane of your library. Select all of the files in the movie display and delete them.
iTunes will ask you if you want to keep the original files on your hard drive or move them to the Trash. You're going to want to Trash those files. Doing so will remove all of the original files from your hard drive and free up a whole lot of space. Repeat this step with your television shows and any other iTunes files you've elected to move to your new external location.
4: Jedi Drive Tricks
It's time to get those files on your external drive back into iTunes. Select the folders you transferred to your external drive and then, holding down the option key on your keyboard, drag them into iTunes. By holding down the option key as you add the files, you're ordering iTunes to create a link to them, instead of copying them to your computer's designated iTunes folder like it normally does.
There you have it: an iTunes library that spans multiple locations. For more Apple tricks and tips, be sure to check back with us as often as humanly possible!
Follow this article's author, Seamus Bellamy on Twitter
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