[herbsman]

How do you all do it? For someone with a massive library like myself (100gigs) how do you keep track of all the changes that are being made locally and match these changes with the main backup folder?

My main problem is I usually back up my entire itunes library folder onto an external HD because it's the most simple way I know how to back up, but sometimes I remove files locally to slim things down. After a few months, if I simply replace my already backed up itunes library folder, the files that I removed locally are now mirrored with the new backup folder, so I have essentially lost songs by using my method.

It gets a bit mind-boggling for myself trying to keep track of what's where, what's gone, blah blah blah! If there are any great tips you can share or even an application that deals with this exact issue, please let me know!

[mitchell_pgh]

I'm just holding my breath until Leopard. I currently backup my home folder... but I don't do it religiously (I know... sinner).

[kcmac]

Yeah. Time machine.

[mitchell_pgh]

If Time Machine is ANYTHING like Apple showcased... I'm absolutely sold. I just hope Leopard doesn't have some crazy requirements to run Time Machine (like intel only or a high end video card [don't know why it would, but who knows]).

[steve626]

You should look into backup software such as Retrospect and Data Backup.

They can clone a folder (such as your Music folder) to an external drive, and you can instruct them to update the clone for only the items that have changed since the last time. Hence the first clone takes an hour or so, but after that it's just a few minutes.

Retrospect can also backup to CD/DVD media across multiple CD/DVD disks as necessary, but for your music library it would take about two dozen DVDs.

[kcmac]

The cloning machine to use is SuperDuper. Nothin better out there.