Preventing A Music File Disaster

A post on The Content started a rumor that iTunes will let you redownload your purchased music collection in case your hard drive is damaged. He wrote to iTunes, to which they replied that the "iTunes Music Store does re-grant the purchases history" as a one-time offer only. A reader of Lifehacker confirms this by saying he too was allowed to redownload his music collection. Now, I have not confirmed the rumor, so take this with a grain of salt for now.

What I do know, is that it has motivated me to back up my music collection, especially since I have a Macbook Pro running Windows, and well let's just say it keeps me on my toes.

According the Apple's website, there are a few ways to back up your iTunes music collection but the most useful ones are:

1. Back up your files on an external hard drive:

All you have to do here is drag and drop files from your music library to your external hard drive. If you don't know where your files are, read this article from the Apple website.

You can also go to Edit>Preferences>Advanced>General to see or change the location of your stored iTunes music files. If you want to save them to your external hard drive after every purchase, thus freeing your computer from holding all your music files, you can. This is the method I personally have chosen, and works like a charm. Uneasy silence also wrote an easy-to-follow tutorial to help you create a backup from a Windows machine to an external hardrive.

2. Copy your music to a CD or DVD:

Apple has a full tutorial on how to do this for iTunes 5 and 6 users. They also suggest you do incremental backups using a Smart Playlist in iTunes. Instructions should be pretty simple. Create a Playlist, click the playlist and hit the burn button located on the top right corner.

In case you loose your entire collection, you'll be happy to have a back-up. You can also try calling Apple and asking them for that one-time download of your music collection, just don't be upset if they refuse to do it. This is not guaranteed.

How do you back-up your iTunes music? I'm open to suggestions, so comment below.