Backing up your iTunes information
There are two approaches to backing up the iTunes files on your computer.
A. Use the standard iTunes utility to backup up your music collection
To do this, see How to back up your media in iTunes.
B. Backup the files yourself
You can do this either manually, or with a utility like the excellent SecondCopy. Note that you should backup both the music files themselves, and the iTunes Library files that contain the list of all your music, as well as your playlists and playcounts.
- To backup the music files, first find out where they are by going iTunes > Edit > Preferences > Advanced.
- The iTunes Library files (an XML and a binary file) are stored in Windows under My Documents\My Music\iTunes:
Note that if you are using a utility like SecondCopy to regularly copy these, that you should set it to keep say the ten previous versions of these files as well - in case SecondCopy backs up these files before you notice that they have become corrupted.
See also
