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How do I save my music?

G

Gwardys

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 6, 2006
94
0
I'm looking to reformat my Macbook Pro.
But. I have a problem.

33.98 gigs of music are on my laptop.
And because I have a 15'' one, the dvd drive only burns at 4x speed, with 4.7 gigs of music per disc.

I could, burn each and every disc, but the time to do that, and the time to copy it all back over would seem redundent.

Is there anyway I can create a partition that wont get affected when I reinstall OS X, just enough to hold my music and other things? Email, pictures. Ect.

I don't have an iPod large enough to hold a lot of data [a 4 gig mini] and I don't have an external drive either. Burning discs takes forrrrrever. Is there anything I can do?

On a side note. [If I can't do that.]

How do I back up mails files? I have some email messages that should be saved too.
 
Gwardys said:
Is there anyway I can create a partition that wont get affected when I reinstall OS X, just enough to hold my music and other things? Email, pictures. Ect.
Click to expand...
Even if you could you should really want to have a backup on removable media. It's a notebook and can easily be dropped/stolen/suffer HDD failure.

Your options are: 1) get an external HDD 2) get an external (faster) DVD burner 3) Live with the limitations of the internal burner...

B
 
I'm sort of in the same boat as you. I have two computers I mainly use, and my photos on one, and all my music on another. Neither are backed up, and lately i've begun to worry about them. If something happens to one computer, I lose either the music, or the photos. I'm not about to do any sort of data backing up on discs, 4.7gb will take forever, and I don't want to catalog 50 dvds, so i've decided to get a good 300-500gb external harddrive. Actually, i'm going the build it yourself route, buying the hd, then buying the external hd case. Fry's has a 300gb 7200rpm, 16mb cache hd right now for 90 bucks. I've seen decent looking external cases for 20 bucks.

Something to look at for a quick fix. Then when time allows, I might start doing the dvd's here and there.
 
If I were in your situation i'd spring for an external drive. If you don't have one already its great value for the money. Not only can you partition one section for a complete HD backup but you can use the rest to store large things that you want to keep but don't want taking up space on your limited laptop drive. You can get a 200+ GB hard drive easily for about $125. That's just about 50 cents a GB. Worth every penny.
 
Str8edgepunker said:
Honestly, I'd try to find the time to back all of it up to DVD. As long as it's kept safe and secure, those DVD's will last for a long time.
Click to expand...
YMMV. Personally, I've had more failures of DVD writable media than CDs, and they're stored similarly. It's funny how HDDs are probably among the most reliable media around these days...

[Most of the failures have been from media burned by early burners on early media, most recently some Video DVDs that were produced in first generation SuperDrives, and a few that were burned using my first gen HP-100 DVD+RW burner.]

B
 
When you say re-format, do you actually mean you want to change the partition structure, or just that you want to clean-install? Why not do archive & install and then delete the rest of the previous folder aside from the music, once the install is finished?
 
Pardon me for sounding so dumb.
You can do that on OS X?

I'm still a recent switcher.

If I was to do an archive and install, explain to me how it would be different from a normal wipe?

I'm coming from Windows where a clean install means everything is gone. Is it different in the mac world?
 
Gwardys said:
If I was to do an archive and install, explain to me how it would be different from a normal wipe?

I'm coming from Windows where a clean install means everything is gone. Is it different in the mac world?
Click to expand...

When you choose to do an Archive & Install (insert CD, choose Options when it offers the Basic install and select A&I keeping settings/users), OS X basically keeps your User folder intact, reinstalls the System files and then puts the relevant settings back where they should be. It works pretty well... unless of course it's one of your settings that's screwing stuff up to the point you need to do the A&I
 
I hope you know something you might have neglected before- backup often. I think you're best bet is an external- they're well worth the money
 
Gwardys said:
Pardon me for sounding so dumb.
Click to expand...

No pardoning required. :)

When you boot off the system restore DVD, you follow the prompts until you get to a dialog that has an options button (I think in the lower left). It will offer you several options, including the option to archive the system and re-install. Actually, there will be two options -- one will move over your applications and users (which may not do you much, if you want a "clean" install for whatever reason), and the other will not.

What happens is that whatever doesn't get moved over (in the second option, EVERYTHING) goes in a folder in the root of the HD called something like Previous Systems. So that directory will be ginormous, because it will essentially be your entire HD. What you can do is delete everything in it except your user drive / hand pick the things you want to move over, and then delete the rest.

Does that make sense?
 
Gwardys said:
I'm coming from Windows where a clean install means everything is gone. Is it different in the mac world?
Click to expand...
You can do plenty of data-preserving installs on Windows too, unless you only have OEM media. Applications however, are the bigger problem on Windows.

Macs definitely do better at that than Windows on reinstalls since they don't rely on the Registry to keep track of installed applications, settings etc...

You can also do a clean install of OS X if you so desire, and many people do this so that they can eliminate many of the languages and printer drivers they don't intend to use that take up a lot of disk space .

B
 
Uh. Wow. =]
One more reason to love OS X.

Thanks for all of your help.
You just saved me like 50 DVD's and a ton of time.

If I had even thought this was possible and asked on a Windows board, I would have been trolled away.

I love the mac community.
I'm staying for sure if I can get help like this.
 
You could always put everything onto an iPod (if you have one) and then get a program like ipod 2 mac (freeware) and then rip everything onto your newly reformatted computer :)
 
AppleGuy08 said:
You could always put everything onto an iPod (if you have one) and then get a program like ipod 2 mac (freeware) and then rip everything onto your newly reformatted computer :)
Click to expand...

he already said he only has a mini :rolleyes:
 
I did an archive and install, and i'm extremely pleased.

It could not have been easier.

I apreciate all of your help. And currently, I am burning DVD's as painfully slow as it is. I'd rather have 50 DVD's in a binder then ever run into a problem like this again.

I'm also going to make a smart playlist in iTunes.
I'm frequently adding music to my collection, so if I make a playlist from todays date, and say limit to 4.7 gigs i'll be able to burn a dvd and ship it off to my binder without worrying.

Seriously, I could not have asked for more. =]
Thank you all.
 
Gwardys said:
I did an archive and install, and i'm extremely pleased.
Click to expand...
Just curious, what was the issue that made you want to Archive and Install? [Until now, I thought you were asking a hypothetical]. You suually don't have to reinstall OS X unless you have serious problems!

B
 
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