Storing music and photos on external hard drive

Yes you can store your music and pictures on an external HD. It's not a wise idea though to have the same drive do double duty for a TM drive though. You should have 2 separate external drives, one for TM and the other for storing data. Drives are cheap and the risks are pretty high if you store TM and other data on the same drive, if that drive fails you have lost everything! If you are using iTunes and iPhoto once you move the information over to the external drive you need to tell both programs where the information is now stored. How you would do that is in iTunes, Preferences, Advanced and then input the location. For iPhoto you can use this Apple article:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1229

Regards,

Roger

It's better to put your music and photos on a separate hard disk, not the one running your time machine backups. Time Machine will not allow you to backup the disk you are running your backups on. In other words if you put music and photos on the same disk that runs your backups then they will not get backed up.

Hello MBR605

Welcome to Apple Discussions

Yes you can move both your iTunes and iPhoto Libraries to an External HD and easily access then from it.

see > http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1449
and > http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1229

First off I would like to commend you for using Time Machine, I've heard to many sad I lost all of my data stories.

Secondly, you are flirting with disaster if you remove the Libraries from your Internal HD and only keep them in one basket.

Lastly, it is definitely not a good idea to move them to the same External Hard Drive that you are using for Time Machine.
1) if the drive failed you would loose your Libraries
2) Time Machine is ever growing and needs lots of room

What I would suggest if you want to move those Libraries from your Internal HD is to buy a second External HD to move and access your Libraries from. That way you would still have two copies, one copy on the External HD for accessing and one copy on the Time Machine drive.

Dennis

Great minds..... 🙂

😉

I think it's a good idea to the point I have done just that. On my system I have my iMac connected to 3 external HD's.

1. Time Machine drive
2. Photo's and Music drive
3. Bootable Backup using SuperDuper

This frees up space on the internal drive so I have it dedicated to just operating the OS and keeping smaller files such as PDF's, iWork files, etc..

Roger

Answers will very.

I would only do it if my Internal HD was out of space, because I don't like to have more than my TM drive running all the time.