Itunes ?

Al's advice is on the money. Basically you have to stash your music files somewhere safe while you get your music drive into perfect shape, emptied and squeaky clean with all the bookshelves in order. So to speak. Then you reformat the music drive and copy the files back onto it. Then if it all works, you clone your music drive to a reformatted backup drive, using SuperDuper.

Al suggests you stash your music files by copying with the OS. On a Mac, copying files with the OS is called copying in the Finder. You open a window and navigate within it until it shows a list of the files you want to copy. You open a second window which shows the destination, the place you want to copy the files to. Then you select the files in the first window and drag them to the second. The Finder will put up a progress bar to show you how long you'll have to wait till the copy is done.

The only worry I would have here is the possibility that some of the music files have been corrupted. If you have any of these, copying them is not a good idea. They need to be trashed asap. Unfortunately I don't think you can find them without a diagnostic and repair program. I use DiskWarrior. However it costs $100. I have never been sorry I paid the money but you don't have to feel the same way. You can go ahead and do your copy without it. The chances are small that there will be a file corruption problem on the disk.

Thanks so much guys. This has turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I did the same thing with my iphoto backup hard drive. ( creating only a alias, not a backup). I just finished putting all my iphoto pics onto an EHD and am in the process of using superduper to make a copy of that disc for safekeeping. What a disaster that could have been, losing pictures. Worse than music as they can't be replaced.
Tomorrow when i get time i'm going to copy my music over and then reformat the original disc and use it as a backup. You guys have been great, Thank you!

One last question.... What is the advantage of "cloning?" It seems like it is easier to just find it on Finder and drag it over to the new disc. ( ie copying)

I'm not sure either what benefit, if any, would be provided by having a cloned disk, as opposed to simply having a backup disk containing copies of the original files. Perhaps Toby will elaborate.

All I can envision is that it could possibly eliminate the need to point iTunes to a different music storage drive, if the original drive had to be replaced. That would take just a few clicks to do.

Basically, a cloned disk is a disk whose contents are identical to the ENTIRE contents of the original drive, including identification and structure-related information that is used by the operating system but is normally invisible to the user.

Under certain circumstances, having a clone can actually create problems, because (oversimplifying slightly) if both drives are connected simultaneously the operating system may get confused as to which is which.

Regards,
-- Al

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A clone is a bit for bit copy including all hidden files. If you want to make a bootable disk that includes the operating system you have to clone since a backup copy won't grab everything you need to make that work.

If it's just data files then a drag and drop will work but a program like Super Duper is easier and faster especially after the first backup. It will do incremental backups; it will see what is new or changed on the main disk and only copy those to the backup, which is much faster than a full copy.

BTW don't know if it got answered but no, Super Duper doesn't work with Windows formats.

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