‘Keep iTunes Music folder Organized’ Woes
Very recently I had a computer scare that made me readdress my motherboard’s problem with keeping my external Maxtor 300 GB Firewire dive mounted in Windows XP2. I did a reinstalled and had a miserable time getting my secondary data drive to recognize. Although I finally did get it to show, it gave me shivers at the possible amount of data lost I could have experienced.
As a result, I’ve been trying to set up the ideal backup process for our computers. The hands down choice of software that I found is Syncback from 2BrightSparks. There is a free version available that has great options as far as backup, synchronization and scheduling, but I had to upgrade to the paid version since it has allowed custom synchronization options that we needed between our machines. I have profiles in place to back up important documents from both machines to the Firewire drive.
Along with this I’ve been using Beyond Compare 2, which is another shareware gem to compare files and folders, to make sure what I have in my local music drive is exactly what is on my Firewire backup. After hours of meticulous updating to filenames on the backup, I synchronized the local and backup for the one true library.
To my dismay, I discovered that if you leave the “Keep my iTunes Folder Organized” option selected in my windows version of iTunes, then it completely truncates long song file names. This changes the name of the file, thus creating a duplicate in the backup. .
This leads me to the option of turning off the option in iTunes if Windows can’t handle the file name length. I don’t know who to blame; iTunes for following along with the Windows file name length cap, or artists who feel compelled to name their songs some insane length. For the record, I don’t care what my favorite songs are named just as long as it’s not making duplicates in my back up, but come on. I’m sure it’s a limitation built into Windows that prevents long file names, but ID3 tags are just not enough if you’re going to subscribe to some sort of naming convention and it’s simply a pain.
