Keeping content on iPod/cleaning off hard drive....

[Anisoul]

....I have a ton of movies and TV shows on my iPod that I want to keep but I need to erase them from my computer hard drive since they are taking up an enormous amount of space. I know that I can manually manage content via iTunes but wanted to know if everything would be erased if I cleaned up my hard drive?

[skruggie]

Eventually..yes. Because if you don't keep a backup of your music and videos, it's not a matter of "if" you will lose your content, it's more a matter of "when".

[Anisoul]

How long will the content remain, without a back-up, before it "disappears"

[bobb-mini]

Originally Posted by Anisoul

How long will the content remain, without a back-up, before it "disappears"

79.549 hours.



No - no - no! what skruggie was trying to say was, iPod not a reliable storage medium, if ur ONLY copy sits on iPod and it wants to be restored (for lots of reasons) yer had it.

[skruggie]

It is not about content dissaperaing, it is about the chances of having to reformat your ipod at some point in time without having a backup - and when that happens you will lose all of your data. At the end of the day, the ipod is a mini-computer. and computers crash and fail, you should always have a backup of data.

[Anisoul]

I see, thanks for all your help. I guess I'll have to find somewhere to but it all.

[S2_Mac]

So, to actually answer your question.... ;-)

Before you start removing files, connect the iPod to iTunes, and select its icon in the Source column on the left side of iTunes' window; click the Summary tab in the main part of the window and check the box for "Manually manage music and videos" and then click the Apply button in lower-right. No more auto-syncing; no unwanted iPod drainage.

If you forget to set the iPod on Manuaal before dumping stuff from your computer, you can also do this: fire up iTunes; hold down Shift and Control keys while connecting iPod to computer (hold down Command and Option on a Mac); keep holding the keys down until you see the iPod appear in iTunes' Source column. This will skip auto-sync for this connection.

What everyone else has said is right on the money -- you're just asking for a very painful experience when the iPod crashes, gets stolen, finds its way into the clothes washer, etc. Rather than delete these files from your computer, you should find a way to score an external hard drive (250GB for roughly $110, for example) which you can use to store things and still keep your boot drive freed up.

If you decide to get an external drive, post back and folks will help through the (quite simple) process of "consolidating" your library to the external drive.