How to Backup iTunes! With just a glance at your iTunes, someone can know everything they need to know about you.
As your music library is a carefully curated selection of all of your favorite tunes, the last thing you want is for you to be searching for a playlist, only to suddenly realize that your iTunes has crashed and none of your music was saved.
Avoid this tragedy, and read the guide below to learn how to back up iTunes today!
Locally Download All of Your Music
Before you can conduct an iTunes backup, you first need to make sure all of your music is locally downloaded.
While your music library may be in your iCloud storage, locally downloading them is highly recommended to ensure all of your purchases are accounted for.
To do so, launch your iTunes library and locate the song or album you’d like to download. Click on the button with three dots in the corner, and click download on the popup window.
Backup iTunes With Time Machine
Using Time Machine is one of the easiest ways to backup your iTunes library, as it is already built into your Mac.
If you have an external hard drive with significant storage space, you can do regular backups of your entire computer, which will allow you to keep a hard copy of everything and not rely on the cloud.
You can set this to happen automatically anytime the hard drive is connected.
Backup iTunes Manually
If you’d rather manually back up your Apple iTunes account instead of using Time Machine, you must first organize iTunes.
This will help consolidate it so all of your music will be in one place. You can do so by launching iTunes after downloading your local copies, clicking File, then Organize Library.
From here, choose Consolidate Files, and then Okay. This will make files of all of your music, leaving the originals in iTunes.
If you’d like to learn more about managing duplicate music files, go now to this website.
After consolidating your files, connect your external hard drive and click on Finder. Select your Mac’s hard drive, click on music, and drag and drop your music files to your external hard drive or an online backup service.
Click Authenticate, enter your computer’s Administrator’s password and click Okay. The backup process will begin, which could take a very long time if you have an extensive iTunes library.
Sit back, relax, and have peace of mind knowing your music library is safe and secure.
Use This Guide to Learn How to Backup iTunes
Understanding how to back up iTunes can make the difference between losing all of your favorite songs and playlists and keeping these memories forever. Take the time to learn this process, and you won’t ever have to worry about this again.
If you’d like more tech-related content, we’ve got you covered! Head over to our blog and start browsing today!
