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Cloud Music Storage pt2

posted April 29, 2015 #

A few weeks ago I posted about the archaic problem of having an iTunes folder that is sucking up entirely too much harddrive space. Given that cloud storage is so easy and ubiquitous these days I really should not be having such a problem, so I turned to services like Amazon Music Player, Google Play Music and even iTunes Match.

After posting, Paige pointed out her solution - put the entire iTunes library on an external drive, point your iTunes Library over there and sync that to Dropbox. It sounds brilliant! I can continue to function having a local iTunes library that behaves as normal and rest easy knowing that I've got a backup of the whole thing offsite. I can even use an app like Tunebox to access that music on the go.

But it didn't work. I copied the Library over to an external drive and started to sync the files to Dropbox using this handy little SymLink creator so Dropbox thought the folder was local, even though it wasn't. Maybe I set it up wrong but the files never fully sync'ed - 10 days into the process and Dropbox still reported 23+ days to go until completion. And beyond that, every time I unplugged my laptop from the harddrive, Dropbox saw the folder as empty and started emptying the contents (see Problem #1).

Overall, I'm happy to see that Google Play Music syncs my iTunes folder with their cloud and I can access that anywhere - but is there no tenable solution with having that drive sync'ed with a file service - not a Google Powerhouse? I'm certain I'm overthinking this and I know I'm close but I'd love some insight to connect the final dots. Are people seriously just fine with having Spotify and Rdio at their disposal and that's all they need?