Restoring iTunes Backups
Oct 24th, 2009 by mark
In Backing Up iTunes Purchases I talked about how I made DVD backups of a portion of my iTunes library. Now that I have a significantly larger hard drive (320 GB versus 100 GB) it’s time to put the restore feature to the test.
After an initial scare when I couldn’t find the backup where I thought it should be, everything seems to be working swimmingly. My recollection was that I had backup my iTunes purchases to one of my external backup drives, however I wasn’t able to find the material on either of those disks. For a few minutes I wondered if the backup had been there only to have been overlain with a subsequent full-drive backup. Then it occurred to me to re-read the posting I made, maybe I had left my self a clue.
Turns out the backup wants to be to CD or DVD. Armed with that knowledge it was relatively short work to find the five DVDs I made in May 2008.
Restoring from the DVDs is simple. Insert the disk into the computer and iTunes asks if you want to restore. There’s an option to overwrite existing material, but otherwise you just click restore and sit back while the process happens. It could not be simpler.
[...] UPDATE: October 24, 2009 – I’ve now successfully restored the backed up material to my new computer. You can read about that in Restoring iTunes Backups. [...]