News
iTunes 10.4 removes Back Up to Disc feature
By Jesse Hollington
Applications Editor, iLounge (Google+)
Published: Thursday, August 18, 2011
News Category: Apple, iTunes
Apple has quietly removed the “Back Up to Disc” feature in iTunes 10.4, as indicated in a recently updated Apple Support article. First introduced in iTunes 7, the Back Up to Disc feature allowed users to backup all or a portion of their iTunes library to optical media such as CD or DVD, preserving library metadata such as playlists, play counts, and ratings in the process. This feature is no longer available in iTunes 10.4, with Apple now suggesting that users instead backup their iTunes Library manually to an external hard drive or that Mac OS X users can rely on Time Machine to provide this capability. It appears that iTunes 10.4 will continue to read backup media created with this feature in prior versions of iTunes, but is unclear whether this support will continue in future versions.
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1
It never really needed to be there. You can just create a playlist and burn it, and the playlist can be as long as you want it to be. Something they need to ADD, though. BURN TO BLU-RAY. Enough time has gone by, Apple ... ADD IT ALREADY!
Posted by Jeff Stockman on August 18, 2011 at 3:16 PM (PDT)
2
Actually, it kinda did need to be there. I used this feature on a semi-regular basis a couple of years back, and it saved me when my hard drive went poof.
Yes, spare external hard drives are much cheaper for the capacity now…but it would still be a nice option for those who, for whatever reason, have a DVD burner but no ability or need for an external hard drive.
Posted by Daniel S. on August 19, 2011 at 7:32 AM (PDT)
3
@Jeff Stockman (#1): Actually, the Back Up To Disc feature differed from simply burning a playlist to disc in that it preserved other library details such as playlists, ratings, play counts and so forth. These backups could be automatically restored to iTunes with all of that data intact.
Burning a playlist to a data CD or DVD simply burned the actual media files without any other iTunes-specific information, in the same way as copying them manually would. To get them back into iTunes, you would instead have to create a new library and reimport them manually.
Posted by Jesse Hollington in Toronto on August 19, 2011 at 8:56 AM (PDT)