Off Topic: iTunes Migration from one USB HD to a new one
When I did my last backup of my HD containing all my iTunes sound and video files I recognized, that this hd will not live longer than two or three more days. So the first thing I did was to buy a new hd and copy all files from the old one to the new one. This leads into the first trouble because I was switching from one operating system to a different one. Starting point was Windows, new system was a Windows VM running on Ubuntu in a VMWare Workstation.
I did a couple of tests on how to implement this. The best way was the following:
- Make a backup copy of your iTunes music folder.
- Make a backup copy of your media files.
- Switch to iTunes folder. In my was: C:\Users\knaepp\My Music\iTunes
- Make backup copies of all files in this folder (eg create a zip-archive)
- Edit file "iTunes Music Library.xml" with a real text editor (notepad++ or SCI TE TextEditor on Linux)
- Search and replace all wrong foldernames in this file.
- Move file iTunes Library.itl to a different folder.
- Recreate this file by hand (eg copy con "iTunes Library.itl" - enter - F6 - enter)
- Start iTunes.
- iTunes recognizes that "iTunes Library.itl is not correct and will recreate this DB-file. (This will last a while..... be patient ... in my case - which meant 11000 media files - all about eight hours)
- Your library will now point to the new directory.
- Have a lot of fun (instead of waiting)