iTunes music backup

[Elrich]

I have a backup of all my music on an external drive. But I haven't backed up in a while. My usual solution has been to just delete the entire backup and copy everything from my current iTunes folder as a new backup, but this is time consuming.

Does anyone know a good application that would compare the two, notice what's missing from the old backup, and copy files from my current iTunes to the backup? (and also note what files I had deleted from my current iTunes and delete them in the backup?)

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

You should look at Super Duper, it can do that. It will do the initial back up then when you sync it again when you're ready it can be configured to compare the internal & external drives & only copy if there has been a change & if you've deleted something on your internal drive then it will delete the same file on the external drive.

You don't seem to be using Time Machine is that right? That would also do what you want but in a slightly different way.

 

[Elrich]

Actually, I have SuperDuper and I'm using Time Machine, but my music is on an external drive. Can either of them copy from one external drive to another?

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

My music is also stored on an ext HD. I used to have SuperDuper but don't use it anymore, opting instead for Time Machine.

This means I can't verify whether or not it's possible but I cannot see why not.

If you already have SuperDuper why not test it out? Time Machine as you probably know just makes incremental back ups, each one kept alongside the other until the disk is full then it deletes the earliest backups. It can skip backing up selected folders or discs but really backs up everything each time so SuperDuper is probably a good bet.

 

[Elrich]

It does work (I'm doing it now), but it just deletes the old backup and then copies the entire current drive. Which is OK, but time-consuming. I couldn't find an option to simply add to/delete from the backup any files that had been added to/deleted from the current version.

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

When I used SuperDuper to clone my Mac's internal drive I set the prefs to only copy changes over, not to do a complete clone every time just to look at whether the original & the back up were different in any way, I'm sure that setting must still be there somewhere

 

[Elrich]

The problem is I'm a cheapskate and I have the free version. I'll have to invest a little money in it, haha