HHey guys so I want to get a new MacBook and store everything like pictures, iTunes, iPhone backup, etc on an external drive so little is stored on the on board hard drive. Can this be done so that when you say open iPhoto, it can access the pictures from the drive but not have them on the main internal hard drive?
iPhone 4, iOS 5.1
Yes you can.
But a word of advice: do not store "everything" externally: the Home folder and the System folders should stay on the Startup disk. But not all of the Home Folder is necessary. You can move the Music, Movie, Photo and such out. That alone reduces the used space on the Startup drive enormously. Just move them, the next time you open iPhoto hold the Alt(option) key and point iPhoto to the new location, same for iTunes.
HI,
Yes, you can do that. If you have your iTunes folder on an external drive, the first time you open iTunes, hold down the Option key and select Choose library, then navigate to the iTunes folder on the external drive and click Open. This should work for Photos too.
If you do that and want to use Time Machine for backups, you have to do a few adjustments. See this article. http://pondini.org/TM/32.html
You should have your Time Machine backups on a separate external drive.
OK great. But if I'm moving from a Big Mac Pro to a MacBook, how do I go about moving all of this over?
You can use Migration Assistant. Move your content to a new Mac - Apple Support
acook1985 wrote:
OK great. But if I'm moving from a Big Mac Pro to a MacBook, how do I go about moving all of this over?
Copy and paste. Select the files you want to copy, make sure the external hard drive is connected, then paste them into the folder you want them to be in on the external drive. Once safely in place, delete the originals from the computer's internal drive, then start the process all over again for everything else you want to move.
Storing everything on external hard drive
