[rocky raccoon]

im hoping someone can help me with this.

ive recently switched to mac, and ive found a nifty little program called instant handbrake.

i think im going to need an external hard drive if im going to use it alot though.

now for my question... if i have an external hard drive constantly plugged in and i save my movies to an it and drag the files into itunes. will there be any problems?

so basically will i be able to have my music saved on my macbook, and my movies (which munch up disk space) on an external hard drive?

also any recommendations for HDD's? Whats the best format for mac's?

[frankthetank966]

check out this program on apple.com "backup" it is a nifty program that schedules backups for you. you must have a .mac account to download it though. if you dont just sign up for a 60-day trial

[stefanicotine]

I don't see how Backup will help him store his media on an external drive.

You can store your media on your external and link to the files from iTunes. I don't have my Mac with me right now, but I believe it's in the "Advanced" preference pane (Or something similar) in iTunes where you can browse for a folder to store you library and disable the "Copy files to library when played" check box. Again, I don't have my Mac so my terminology may be off. But you don't need special software to do what you want.

And there are alot of freeware backup programs that kick Backup's butt. iBackup for example. Check it out.

[rocky raccoon]

its only films that i really want on the external hard drive.

so you think this should allow me to add movies to itunes that are not stored on the local drive? i dont want itunes to remove the movies though - should i be somewhere with my macbook / ipod video but not my external hard drive. you catch my drift?

[stefanicotine]

Oh, ok. I'm not sure exactly how you'd do that. I could tell you, but not without my Mac.

[Phil333]

Bump because I'm trying to do this same thing and am looking for an answer. Thanks.

[walkerjs]

I keep full (non-iPod) movies on an external drive, copying only those I want to watch on the go to the internal drive on my Macbook and then deleting them later, but I don't keep them in iTunes.

I'm pretty sure that if you have movies on an external drive (with music on the internal drive) that iTunes will just put a (!) next to the ones on the external one while it's disconnected. When you connect it back up the (!) should go away, or at least it will when you try to play the movie. Then again I'm only pretty sure. You might check into iTunes multiple libraries.

[ecking01]

I wanna do the same thing as the original poster, keep my music in my itunes library on my internal hard drive and keep my itunes movies for frontrow, appletv, etc on an external drive.

I want itunes to copy my music over and manage my content, just not my movies, they're taking up too much space on my mbp's internal 80gb.

[walkerjs]

Ah, well here it looks like the Alias is your friend. On my external drive I have created a folder called External Drive Movies, in which I put all of the movies I want to reside on the external drive. To get Front Row to see it, I make an alias of it, then move that alias over to my internal drive in the Movies folder on my Macbook. Viola! Front Row includes External Drive Movies in the Videos menu.

You can probably do this iTunes by copying the alias over to the iTunes folder in place of whatever Videos folder iTunes expects to be there.

Back when I had a Mac Mini with limited space I used the Alias trick to have iTunes think the library was on the internal drive, but the Alias pointed to the external drive so it just used that as where my music was. You can probably take this the next step and just have an alias pointing to the videos on the external drive within the iTunes Music folder. Difference was that the external drive was always connected to my Mini. Now I disconnect the MB from time to time. It would seem Front Row just ignores the fact that there is nothing there when the alias points to a temporarily nonexistant drive. Once it's connected again, Front Row will see it again. Proabably the same with iTunes.

Also it seems that when I sleep my MB with the external drive connected, it doesn't like it when it wakes up. To be sure, always eject and disconnect (or at least just eject) your external drive before sleeping your Mac. It did the same thing with my Mac Mini. For a second (while testing this) I though my external drive was toast! Hate to lose 180GB of stuff!

(For the power, UNIX geek users, you can go into terminal, cd to your ~/Movies directory and use

$ ln -s /Volumes/Whatyourdriveiscalled/External\ Drive\ Movies .
)