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another newbie mac question
Sorry for all the questions.
Still playing around with my new mac.I purchased the 1.8ghz dual intel mac mini with 80 gig harddrive. Which is adequate, but I’m afraid once I transfer my PC files over, I’ll be left with less than half the space I have now.
My question is regarding external hard drives. Can I hook on up, and throw my home folder onto that, without messing up the mac? That way I can have up to 500 gigs of anything I want, and still not worry about the mac itself running out of space?
Thanks
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5 Replies
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I honestly don’t know if you can move the home folder, but I’d suggest leaving it where it is.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t use an external drive in the way you want. Stuff doesn’t have to live in the home folder. I have 2 drives in my Powermac and lots of files live on the 2nd drive. I try to put everything I create on the 2nd drive and that leaves the primary drive free for iTunes and iPhoto to have room on.
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good point.
However it actually the stuff in itunes I want to put on a separate drive. -
Well, you’re in luck because iTunes is one of the programs that’s a bit more versatile.
Go into the iTunes Preferences, click advanced and click the “change” button. Set the Music folder to whatever folder you like on any drive. So, make a folder on the external drive and call it “Music” or whatever and then pick that. Make sure the two check-boxes below it are checked on as well (“Keep folder organized” and “Copy files to iTunes”).
After you’ve made that change, go to the “Advanced” menu and select “Consolodate Library.”
That should copy all your music to the new drive and everything you import from that point on into the new folder. That folder will be the iTunes folder.
Double check the new folder to make certain everything IS in there and then you can go back to the old files in the home folder and erase the old copies of the music.
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wicked.
Thanks man.
I’ll probably be buying an external harddrive early in the week, so i’ll let you know how it goes. -
It’s a common organization scheme to keep your apps and system and regular doc files on your boot drive and media files like music, photos, and, most importantly, video on a second drive. I would also consider getting another external drive and backing up everything. Make the back up bootable and if you ever have any problems, you can get a loaner or new computer, boot from the back-up and not miss a beat.
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