i am almost completely out of hard drive space on my macbook pro. last evening i went through deleting songs, photos, and anything i could find that was marginal and still was only able to free up 4g.

my question is, having a 16 g iphone, i have put about 11 films into itunes and have about 20g of music, of which i transfer 6 movies onto the phone along with more than 3 g of music.

what i see as the best solution is to move the 11 to 14 g of movies out of itunes and onto an external hard drive. then when i sync the iphone just not have the sync movie tab checked and whatever movies i have on the iphone stay as they were. then when i want to change i move them back and forth.

this is probablyt such a dumb question i'm almost embarrassed to ask but having moved recently from pc to mac i was wondering if there's something i'm missing just in case there's an even simpler way to do this without moving the movies back and forth?

i've already taken extra valium in preperation for any responses that make me feel more lame than i am...or computer illiterate!

thanks regardless...

You don't have to move the movies back and forth to your iTunes library. Just move them to your external hard drive - then when you want to sync a film to your iPhone you can do it directly from there. i.e. navigate to the folder where your vids are using finder, then drag and drop the file(s) to your iPhone in iTunes.

Basically what I'm saying is you don't have to have the videos appearing in your iTunes library. You can just drag and drop from finder directly into your iPhone.

make sure you dont have your data only o the external hard drive, they fail frequently relative to internal ones

im in the process of getting 2 internal 400gb hard drives for my laptop

i actually moved the films to the hard drive i'm using for time machine but when i wanted to sync the phone the problem becomes syncing the movies. i unchecked sync movies and the warning came up that i would lose the movies i had on the iphone. that's means i have to move the films back and forth each time i want to sync. isn't there some way to get around this?

apple software is a bitch, it really locks you in, i hate they company ethos

Can you not just move your entire itunes movie collection to your external HDD, then delete them from itunes. After this just readd them to itunes from their location on the EXT. HDD (I know that you can do this with windows itunes) Then all you would need to do is when ever you sync to your iPhone, make sure your EXT. HDD is connected up and voila, you're good to go.

With regards to al217739's comment about EXT. HDDs being less reliable, I don't see how you can say this, maybe you've just been unlucky, but, the sheer fact that the mechanical element of the EXT. HDD is used far less frequently means that they are far less likely to die from mechanical failure. That's why most folks use them for backup purposes, as I say, maybe you've just been unlucky.

I myself, have yet to have a single HDD die on me, going back at least 10-12 years, guess I'm just a lucky boy (touch wood)

moving them back and forth is what i just did but 11g of video takes a bit to move back and forth. what i'm not understand is, as long as the movies are on the phone, why shouldn't just turn off the movie sync leave them on there as opposed to deleting them. i'm not sure why apple did that?

Originally Posted by Doktaphex

Can you not just move your entire itunes movie collection to your external HDD, then delete them from itunes. After this just readd them to itunes from their location on the EXT. HDD (I know that you can do this with windows itunes) Then all you would need to do is when ever you sync to your iPhone, make sure your EXT. HDD is connected up and voila, you're good to go.

With regards to al217739's comment about EXT. HDDs being less reliable, I don't see how you can say this, maybe you've just been unlucky, but, the sheer fact that the mechanical element of the EXT. HDD is used far less frequently means that they are far less likely to die from mechanical failure. That's why most folks use them for backup purposes, as I say, maybe you've just been unlucky.

I myself, have yet to have a single HDD die on me, going back at least 10-12 years, guess I'm just a lucky boy (touch wood)

maybe i have, ive had 2 go in 1 year, where ive never had an internal one go!
i think they say the first few months is the worst part, if they get through that its fairly good

but due to that ive got 2 internal ones as said (one fast OS, games etc and one slow fims music etc) on the laptop and i may well get an external one for a complete copy of both the internal ones

What make were the EXTs that died?

i cant remember the make, it was a while ago, but they were usb powered 160gb ones

i was looking at the western digital wireless one but you cant stream mp3s!