A quick fix for itunes

by Bryon D Beilman

Lets start out with the statement "Solid State Drives Rock!" Yes my Lenovo with a solid state drive, and Windows7  is the ultimate productive tool for me.  I am very prudent about what I put on my laptop, however, sometimes I cannot help how much "cruft" I suddenly have on the disk. If you have read any of my past blogs, you know I don't like to pay the extra premium for state of the art, and go for the sweet spot of price/performance. Putting this all together, I didn't spring for the 250GB ueber expensive SSD drive and my 150Gb SSD drive, despite my best intentions gets filled up.  One of the reasons is that as a policy, we encrypt all of our work related data, so I have a 45 GB TrueCrypt Volume on it and do not encrypt the who disk for reason's stated in Jeff's blog posting.  The remaining 100Gb has Windows, my apps and it turns out , music and significant space that holds my iphone backups that happen automagically.

Fill Baby Fill

Suddenly, my disk is getting full and and that is not good, esp for solid state drives.  In Linux/UNIX, there is the very useful and easy concept of symbolic link, and hard links, where you can move files and folders and then link to them to make them appear as they are there, but perhaps on a different disk.  Windows has shortcuts, but that is not the same thing.

I have another secondary, less important disk that is in my computer that sits inside a Faux CD caddie and it is large and slower , perhaps not that slow as it was the original Lenovo disk, but it is not a solid state disk.  It is my I: drive.  I keep downloads there, temp files and my music , as that doesn't have to be fast.  Itunes will let you put a library of music there, but they don't let you determine where it backs up the iphone and other thing that easily can take up 15GB.

It turns out that NTFS has a symbolic link, and they call it a "junction", and it can be downloaded from Microsoft here.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896768.aspx

In my case, to relocate my MobileSync library to my secondary disk I did the following:
Download the "junction.exe" file from the link above and place on

For example, let's say you want your iPhone backup to be I:\backup\MobileSync folder. You would do this:

1. close iTunes
2. Move the folder content c:\users\<username>\application data\apple computer\mobile sync\backup to I:\backup\MobileSync
3. Open a command prompt (CMD) and enter these commands:

(FOR WINDOWS VISTA / 7)
I:>junction "C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup" "I:\backup\MobileSync" -s

NOTE 1: Change "<username>" to match your current username.

NOTE 2: You can change the target I: for any other drive you have, like a external drive.

In my case, I now have 15GB more on my SSD drive and my important, but not critical to be on C: MobileSync folder is now on another disk.  This is a good tool to keep in your toolkit and relocate data when you need more space.