How do I back-up to external hard drive?

Just copy the itunes music folder to the external drive. unless you've specified a different location you should find it in the my music folder.

No authorisation issues unless you need to re-install windows or get a new computer, in which case deauthorise the computer before hand.

I have a similar problem. I copied all of my iTunes data to an external hard drive. I've re-imaged the machine and now can't get iTunes to recognize any of my music, video, or podcasts. I didn't de-authorize the account first. I wasn't aware that I had to. I also have all of the data on my iPod. Any idea how to get iTunes to read my external drive? If possible I'd like to leave the data on there.

Since you're using Windows, why not try SyncToy? This utility makes it easy to create a backup of a folder & it's subfolders which can subseqently be updated with any changes. First time out just copy your entire My Music folder out to the external drive. Then create a sync pair between the folder on your hard drive and the one on the external drive. Every now and again you can sync the two folders so that the changes you've made can be copied over to the backup. If you lose anything from your main library you just copy it back manually. I'd recommend you preview each sync op to make sure it's not going to do anything drastic.

I use SyncToy to keep my library synced between a PC at home, a PC at work and a 500Gb external drive that I take backwards & forwards. A degree of caution is needed for this however as copying the iTunes library files between machines is generally not recommended. Backing up locally on the other hand is a good move.

tt2

How do you mean it won't recognise the music etc? In itunes have you done 'file/add library'?

Message was edited by: alicanlondon