Quick Question Regarding External Drives

[amplex007]

Hey everyone, I just ordered a 1 TB external hard drive online. I'm looking to use it for two purposes: 1) to consolidate my entire iTunes library onto it in order to free up space on my desktop and 2) to set up automatic backups from my desktop.

My question is this, is it ok to do both of these things on the same drive? Considering that I'll have my entire iTunes library on this drive, I'm pretty worried about the automatic backup somehow interfering or overwriting it. Any help is appreciated, as I know very little about using external drives or making backups. Thanks!

 

[WyomingKnott]

Technically, it is okay to do this. Any sane backup hardware will not overwrite other data on the drive.

Practically, the bad idea is not colocating backups and iTunes, it's not having a backup of iTunes. I would strongly suggest that you purchase a new internal drive, put your iTunes on it, and back up both internal drives to the external drive. That way, your iTunes is protected if your external drive bites the dust.

I don't know their current policy, but iTunes didn't used to let you re-download your library if you lost your local copy. With these cloud initiatives, this may no longer be a problem.

 

[amplex007]

Thx for the advice, I will look into getting another internal drive. BTW, the new iCloud features only cover music and apps. These are backed up in the cloud and can be downloaded anytime on any device. TV shows and movies, however, are not supported by iCloud (due to legal issues with the production studios). The many, many TV shows I have are the main reason I want to consolidate on a new drive. When I built my current rig 3 years ago I thought it would be impossible to fill up 320 GB... I was wrong.

 

[WyomingKnott]

When DOS came into general use, no-one could imagine needing more than 640k of memory. We just keep finding more things to occupy space...