iTunesFS
My iTunes library is something on the order of 12 GB. This includes iTunes Music Store purchases, things I ripped from my CDs, etc. For the most part, this is synced to my older 30 GB iPod. Though there are some ways to get the data back to a local drive, I never bothered to look into them.
However, backups have been on my mind. We got a MyBook World Edition, to provide some RAID-protected space for backups and archiving over my LAN. Still, given that I regularly copy my iTunes library to my iPod makes it frustrating to me to give up the space and develop a process to back up that library.
This week, coincidentally, a blog pointed me to iTunesFS. This is built upon Google's MacFUSE. What it does is allow you to mount your iTunes library as a file system.
On its face, it doesn't sound that impressive--you can browse your iTunes library, after all. However, it build it based on the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file. Cool things happen. For instance, playlists, normally just a list of songs, show up as folders. I can drag all the files to another media en mass.
The other cool thing is that the iPod can be mounted and copied from. Again, this is something normally not possible. And, again, things can be copied around. Like, say, from a live iPod to a resurrected MacBook.
This is something that probably fairly specialized applications, and is read only. But my solution to backing up my iTunes library (without being redundant of existing processes) is found!
