How can I move my iTunes movies from my computer to an external hard drive? After I copy them to the drive, do I just delete them from my computer? How will I be able to watch them again?

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How can I move my iTunes movies from my computer to an external hard drive? After I copy them to the drive, do I just delete them from my computer? How will I be able to watch them again?

Hi,

I have a MacBook Air (July 2013) with the latest Mavericks OS X. I also have the lastest version of iTunes.

My computer has very little memory left, so I wanted to free some up. When I looked, movies were taking up a considerable amount of space. I want to move them from my computer, but still be able to watch them if I want to later. I haven't purchased an external drive yet, because I didn't know what size to get. I also have a lot of Photoshop files that are taking up a lot of memory, so I might put some of those on too. Would you recommend a 1 TB one or bigger?

Can you take me through the exact process of moving my iTunes movies to the external drive? I understand where to find the files (My Name<Music<iTunes Media<Movies), but am stuck from there. Do I simply drag them to the external drive and then delete them? Will this delete them from my iTunes library? How will I go about watching them again? I assumed that I would just plug the external hard drive in, click in the movie and watch. Is it this simple? I only want to move my movies, otherwise I would follow tutorials for backing up the library. Once you back up the movies, can you delete them from your computer?

Thanks,

Molly

OS X Mavericks (10.9.1)

Posted on Apr 8, 2014 4:24 AM

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Limnos

Level 10

411,223 points

Apr 8, 2014 6:25 AM in response to MollySunshine

iTunes does not have provision for automatically storing one kind of media on a separate drive, so you have some basic decisions to make first. Do you want these movies to still appear in your iTunes library, or are you content with browsing filenames on a drive in Finder when you want to look for one? The second's the easiest thing because then you don't have to have an external drive permanently turned on and attached to your computer (wired or wireless). To do that you literelly only need to drag your movies folder to an archive drive and delete movies from iTunes. To watch them again you can add it back to iTunes while holding down the option key so the movie is used from its location on the external drive.

There's ways to move the movies to an external drive while keeping them in iTunes but the external drive iwll always have to be turned on and connected to the computer or you will see a bunch of broken link exclamation marks.

Realize what you are talking about is not "backup". Backup (which you should do) is putting a second or more copy of items on external drives for the day when your internal drive fails and everything on it is lost, inclduing all your home photos and perhaps things that have been pulled from the iTunes Store and can no longer be re-downloaded.

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