Backup/Restore of iTunes

[Aluminum_Butt]

My wife's computer is in need of a clean reinstall of Windows. She has several gigabytes of music and videos in iTunes. I can handle the Windows stuff with no problem, but I'm not an iPod user, and I'll end up in divorce court if I screw up the iTunes.

 

A little bit of searching indicates that there is a backup and restore utility built-in to iTunes that will burn everything off to CD's or DVD's. That seems simple enough. Has anyone had experience with this - is it flawless? From a DRM-perspective, will be it okay restoring to what will look like a different PC? Finally - one of the key reasons I'm doing this is the drive on her PC is partitioned up, and there are iTunes files scattered everywhere. Is the restore going to be okay with just putting everying into a single (default) location?

 

Strange post for an MC board, but I'll bet somebody has the answers to this stuff. TIA!

[OverMyHead]

Yes, this should work. If you are going to use this method, I would recommend doing the backups and then de-authorizing the computer in iTunes before you wipe the disk. Once you've rebuilt the computer and restored the backups, you can re-authorize the computer. This will keep you from wasting one of your 5 authorized computers for the DRMed content.

 

There are other ways to do this with an external drives as well since the iTunes backup will only let you use optical media (DVDs, CDs). It really depends on the size of your iTunes library. My library is over 200GB and that would be way too many DVDs.

[smiller]

And then start buying music from Amazon so you won't have to worry about DRM issues until the end of time...

[sgendler]

Also, there's no real reason to worry about authorizing and de-authorizing. If you ever run out of authorizations, there is an option to de-authorize all computers from the account and start over.