Wireless Hard Drive

With the burgeoning size of Itunes libraries these days, requests to move them to external or wireless hard drives are becoming more common all the time.  To that end, this is a guide on how to accomplish such a task.  The beauty of course is that you will have all of your music files located on a central hard drive that is accessible to all via a wireless connection.  Of course this is also a great way to ensure you aren't burning up your internal storage space like it is going out of style, as we all know that music files can add up pretty quickly.  And that doesn't even include the podcasts or especially movies that people are accumulating also.

Move Your Itunes library to your wireless hard drive

So, before we begin, let's make sure that we do one thing prior to trying anything else.  Let's use an external hard drive (or your exact same wireless hard drive) and backup our library.  This likely won't be needed, but in the case of catastrophy we want to have all of our files in a nice safe place that is the same as prior to us beginning.  Simply select File -> Library -> Backup To Disc.  From there you just select the location that you want the files to be backed up to.  Let it go and walk away for a while for it to complete.  Finished? Good.  Now we can go about moving our library to our wireless hard drive.

Ok, before you start to move your files to an external wireless harddrive.  Make sure you go into your Itunes library and get rid of any old podcasts, music files or movies that you don't really want any more.  Cleaning these up now will save a ton of time when you go to move them all to your wireless hard disk drive.  Ok, now we are ready for business.  Go to Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced Tab.  In the top right you will see a "change" button, click on that and you want to change your current location to where your wireless drive is.  Now make sure that your "copy files to Itunes Music Folder When Adding To Library" box is checked.  This will allow for the files to continue to be placed on your wireless drive and Itunes will know both to do that and where it is located.  Now click the Ok button and let it run.

All right, here comes the fun part.  Select File-> Library -> Consolidate Library.  Select the "consolidate" button and it will prompt you that this can't be undone.  We are ok with that since we are planning on moving it all to our wireless hard drive and we also created that backup before.  Now, one other thing, at this point you still haven't removed the files from your internal hard drive.  This is good in case something goes wrong.  So after the entire consolidate process is complete you want to make sure that everything actually moved over to the wireless hard drive.  If it did indeed move, then you can go ahead and delete the files right in Itunes by selecting them and pressing delete.

This should free up your internal hard drive space and also give you and other computers access to this Itunes library.  So there you have it, a quick, easy ansswer to how do I move my Itunes library to a wireless hard drive.

When people think of wireless hard drives, it isn't completely obvious that an external hard drive might be required.  And to be truthful, you can set up a wireless LAN of sorts that would allow you to connect with a separate desktop computer or similar to access its hard drive.  In essense you would be creating a backup area on your other computer to store files that you have from other devices.  However, this is rarely the case when it comes to people talking about using a wireless hard drive.  In that case, we are talking about having a completely separate or external hard drive that is able to be connected to wirelessly.  To that end a few options are available.

The first is to buy a wireless router that has a special area to place external hard drives into.  A good example of this is a Linksys wireless hard drive enclosure.  This device works like any other wireless router to connect wireless devices to a network.  Where it differs from there is that it has slots specially made to handle hard drives that get connected physically to the router.  These hard drives are then available to whatever device is connected wirelessly to them.  To that end you can transfer files back and forth between your external hard drives and the device you are on.

You can also buy a one stop shop type of wireless hard drive such as the Apple Time Capsule.  The premise behind the time capsule and those drives that closely resemble it is to be a complete enclosure with a wireless router and a hard drive within them.  Basically once you set up the drive to backup your files it does it automatically in the background while you work or over night.  At the beginning it takes some time to configure and then the initial backup can be quite long (over night or perhaps even longer), but once the initial setup is done and the setting are complete it is a hands off, set it and forget it type of deal.  There is a similar type product manufactured by Iomega called the Iomega 1TB Hard Drive StorCenter.  The premise is the same for all of these devices, although some will add functionality to other aspects such as being able to add printers or other peripheral computer devices to the mix.

Of course the one thing you need to remember is to make certain that the device you purchase has the wireless capability that matches your device.  It is important to know if you will be connecting via WiFi Wireless G or WiFi Wireless B/G or Bluetooth or other.  The important thing of course being that your devices matches the wirless type of your external wireless hard drive.