Backing Up Your iTunes Music Library

Hopefully, you have and use a good backup system to protect all your files, including your iTunes Library. If so, you get extra points from me and can skip the rest of this section.

caution

Backing up is especially critical for music you purchase from the iTunes Music Store. If something happens to this music, you can't download it again without paying for it. If you lose music files you have purchased and don't have a backup, they are gone forever.

If you don't use a backup system to protect yourself, shame on you. However, you can earn some points back by at least backing up your music collection to CD or DVD. You can do this by creating a playlist containing the music you want to back up. Then, you burn that playlist to a CD or DVD. That will place a copy of your music on disc so you can recover it should you ever need to. For detailed steps to burn discs, refer to Chapter 20, "Burning Your Own CDs or DVDs."

If the playlist you select contains more songs than will fit on a single CD or DVD, you will be prompted to see whether you want iTunes to place the playlist on multiple discs. If you allow this, iTunes will keep burning discs until all the songs in the playlist have been placed on a disc.