My wife's hard drive is nearly full as I wrote in an earlier blog. Therefore I decided to move her music into iCloud.
But for some reason I could not access iCloud through Lion. I could however through Safari.
ICloud will cost by the way money, when you need more than 5 GB and it is not cheap.
The first 5 GB of storage on the service are free. An additional 10 GB will cost $20, 20 GB will cost $40 and 5 0GB will retail for $100. It’s more expensive than Amazon Cloud Drive, which gives 20 GB of space for $20 and lets users store an unlimited amount of music for free.
I decided to move her music to an external hard drive in our network, because iCloud was right now no option (even if I have a developer account and iCloud beta should work). Having the data external accessible over wifi makes this a private cloud. This is cool.
But I did something really bad, I copied the music and changed the music folder in iTunes to new location. However the library still recognized the songs in original folder. I renamed the original folder, I moved the folder to another local location. Nothing helped, when opening iTunes the app recognized the old folder regardless of name or location.
I then renamed the library XML file to .old and reopened iTunes. This worked but of course no songs in iTunes and then I imported the songs to iTunes. The whole process took two hours and a unhappy wife. Doing this did a lot what I did want to avoid. She lost all her ratings and her playlists. The correct approach would have been to use Apple instructions, but I did bing for it when I was too late.
At least we have now for her a private cloud which is much cheaper than $50 a year for Apple's iCloud.
Apple's recommendation:
1. Open iTunes.
2.From the iTunes menu, choose Preferences.
3. Click the Advanced button in the Preferences window.
4. Click the Change button in the iTunes Media folder location pane.
5. In the Change Media Folder Location window that appears, navigate to the location where you would like your new iTunes Media folder to be created.
Note: By default, your iTunes Media folder is a folder named "iTunes Media" in ~/Music/iTunes/ where the tilde "~" represents your home directory.
6. Click the New Folder button in the Change Media Folder Location window.
In the New Folder window that appears, enter the name of the new iTunes Media folder.
7. Click Create.
8. Click Choose in the Change Media Folder Location window.
9. Click OK in the Advanced window.
10. From the File menu, choose Library and then Organize Library if using iTunes 9 or later. If you're using iTunes 7 or iTunes 8 for Mac, choose File > Library and then Consolidate Library.
11. In the Organize Library (or Consolidate Library) window, select Consolidate files.
12. Click OK. Important: This action copies all of your music and media files to the new location. There must be enough hard disk space available to copy all of your music and media files.
13. After the folder has been copied, locate your original iTunes Media folder, and drag it to the Trash. Important: Don't remove the iTunes Library files that may be in the same location as the iTunes Media folder. For more information about the iTunes Library files, see this article.
14. Quit iTunes and then open iTunes once more.
If you receive the alert "The folder containing "iTunes Library" cannot be found, and is required. Please choose or create a new iTunes library," you most likely moved the iTunes Library files. If this is the case, move them out of the Trash and back to where they were.
If you can open and close iTunes without encountering the above alert, empty the Trash.
After all was done I deleted the old local music folder and emptied trash however the computer still believed there is only 1GB space left. I almost got crazy and then remembered that my backup hard drive on my iMac showed (since I moved to Lion) that all backup files are together 16 Terra Byte, but my hard drive is really only 3 TB.
When I rebooted the iMac the folder size was shown correct as 1.4 Terra byte. I rebooted my wife's computer and got a message that the hard drive is almost full. The reboot took 3 minutes but then all was fine, we had again 39 GB available. Which was weird because we deleted only 29 GB.
Playing around with Lion, it seems that Lion is building up a lot of virtual memory to keep track on open apps and documents etc. I might be mistaken, but when I played around I could actually see the disc space going down, but maybe it is just a display issue (maybe this is the reason that Apple did hide the folder and file sizes in Lion). However when rebooting Lion most of the memory is coming back even if Lion is rebooting your computer with all apps ope as you had when you rebooted.
I binged around and did not find any related issues in the internet, yet. But I have the issue on two computers that I believe there is some truth in my discovery.
My iMac had 500GB free memory which did went down to 400GB but stayed steady there. A reboot did give me the 500GB back. Again I don't know if it is only a display issue. Same with my wife notebook. Disc space seemed to be full and we got even a warning but we did not see any performance issues which we should have when the disc space is so low.
Anyway I will keep an eye on it. I love Lion but somehow I don't have full trust in this OS so far.
This is again an example that Apple is not ready for not computer savvy users (which I guess I now belong too, because I did not know how to do the iTunes thing right).
I am sure Apple's Genuis bars will be very busy the next few months.
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