You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

📰 Newsroom Update

Billie Eilish is Apple Music’s Artist of the Year for 2024. Learn more >

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Is consolidating really necessary?

Hello,

I just went through my iTunes library and manually updated all of the missing album artwork. That was a fair amount of work, so now I want to backup my iTunes library. I have a Windows 11 laptop and I want to backup to my external hard drive. Up until this point, I've been backing up the MP3 files, but not the artwork nor the playlists.

I've read a little bit about consolidating the iTunes library and then backing it up. But it seems like that creates a copy of all of the music files. I've got about 38 Gig of music. I've got enough space to create this copy, but it seems like a waste of resources and time.

My music is currently arranged like this:

This PC > Music > Amazon Music

This PC > Music > iTunes > iTunes music

The "Amazon Music" directory contains all of the music I've purchased from Amazon and the "iTunes music" directory contains the music I've ripped from my CDs.

The "itl" file is located here: This PC > Music > iTunes > iTunes Library.itl

So, can I simply copy the entire "This PC > Music" directory to my external hard drive?

Or is "consolidating" somehow adding something to this process that I'm not seeing?

Thanks so much for your replies.

Posted on Mar 12, 2022 10:38 AM

Top-ranking reply

the fiend

Level 7

22,920 points

Posted on Mar 12, 2022 11:40 AM

Consolidating is not necessary. As muguy states, all it does is put everything into the same parent folder. But if you're happy with the layout the way it is, then leave it alone. Like you, I too have my Amazon purchases (along with other online stores) in a separate folder, mainly because the old Amazon downloader set it up that way. Consolidation helps those people who want everything in one place. I do not use consolidate; I know where my stuff is!

However,

ChampionOfIthaca wrote:

But it seems like that creates a copy of all of the music files. I've got about 38 Gig of music. I've got enough space to create this copy, but it seems like a waste of resources and time.

Maintaining a copy of all your music is not a waste of time or space.

Hard drives (and SSDs) fail - it's a fact of life. So the best advice (to everyone) is that you make and maintain a copy of all the music you own, on an external drive. Then if (when) your computer's hard drive fails, you have a backup from which you can re-create your Library.

An external drive for 38GB of files cannot possibly cost too much. I've just looked online at Amazon UK and found two 64GB memory keys (memory stick, USB drive, whatever you want to call them) for £8 and £13 That's about US$11 and $17.

The UK price includes sales tax (at 20% I might add).

View in context

Is consolidating really necessary?

Similar questions