Apple TV fills up hard drive

My laptop is full of AppleTV purchased content. My Apple TV has a big HD, why does it insist on using precious MacBook space? I need that space for video editing. Why does my Apple TV have a huge HD then? I should be able to choose what I want on the Apple TV HD vs my laptop...

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If you turn off syncing, all the content on the tv will be removed, but you should of course already have that content in iTunes on your mac, so it wouldn't be 'gone for ever' so to speak.

Your solution is to get an external HD for your mac and move all your iTunes content to it from your macs internal drive.

Wait - HELP! - i have a similar problem. When I buy a movie it is stored on both the Apple TV and the mac's hard disk. That cannot be the only way - is it? Your help is appreciated - there's got to be a way for it to be stored only on Aplpple TV -please!

There probably is a way, but you want to think long and hard before you do this. If you only have your content on the Apple TV and then you have a problem with the hard disc then you will have lost your purchased content for good.

jjg1udi87 wrote:
But my Apple TV is an external HD with 100s of gigs...

No it is not.

It is 100s of gigs of temporary storage of the content that is on your computer. It is little more then a large cache.

ITunes is the primary location for all content, even that purchased via the ATV. The ATV hard-drive is meant to store media for quick playback and provide portability (For example, you could take your ATV to someone else's house and play back content stored on the HD.)

My iTunes library is about 700GB. My solution to keeping my iMac HD usage down was to purchase a 1TB USB drive and move my iTunes library to that drive.

Do not try to use the ATV's HD as backup device. Apple does not support copying data from the ATV back to your computer.

An interesting thing to know for those moving files to an external hard drive. Itunes always attempts to sync when it is opened. If the external hard drive is not connected or available, iTunes automatically creates a new library in its default location on your computer (Users/yada/yada). It then tends to mess up the pointers between your library and whee the data is actually located (some is still on your hard drive). To fix this, you need to reset the library location (under the apple menu/preferences/advanced) and then go to file/library and choose Consolidate. This takes all data from the default library and copies it back to your re-established library on the external drive. What drives me nuts is that the sync start-up is automatic, and my wife and kids don't make sure the external drive is available when they open iTunes. That means going through this exercise on a weekly basis because Apple hasn't created an option for automatic sync with manual start only (that I know of)

But my Apple TV is an external HD with 100s of gigs...

100's of gigs isn't that much when you're talking about video. Also, as one of the other posters mentioned, it isn't a good idea to have it in one place. A good general practice is to have a backup