When I shut down my computer, I immediately realized that all my music was still on that computer's hard drive, and I could only use iTunes to put it onto my iPad / iPod. I also came to realize that my backups were stored in iTunes as well, including my photos. I needed to address these three issues if I was to keep my computer shut down, and never use it again.
Music:
I have a pretty significant collection of music on my computer. I was managing it manually because I didn't really 'trust' iTunes. I was about to take a pretty big leap of faith in that aspect. Apple announced iTunes match a while back, but I never paid it any mind. It didn't appeal to or interest me because I did not have a need for it. All my music was already on my PC, managed by myself, and the storage on my PC was running in a RAID1 configuration (redundant).
I did some research and found out how iTunes match works. When you turn it on (and pay the yearly fee), iTunes analyzes your library. If it finds any songs that it offers in the cloud, it makes them available to you for download, and permanently adds them to your purchase history. If there are songs that iTunes does not recognize, it will upload them. Once your music is in the iCloud, you can download it, stream it, delete it from your device and download it again if you want. I decided to take the plunge.
My library is about 60GB. The first thing I did was turn my old computer back on. I told iTunes to find all the media on my computer and add it to my library. This took some time, but eventually completed. The next thing I did was turn on iTunes Match. This took WAY more time. I think it finished eventually two days later. The duration could be attributed a bit to the wonderful windows update that installed and rebooted my PC in the middle of the night. Then there was a power outage that also caused the PC to reboot. iTunes recovered gracefully, and eventually finished. At that point, all my music was... well, out there! I opened the Music app on my iPhone and something interesting happened. Genius came to life! I've been using Pandora pretty regularly. Genius allowed me to pick genres, and the neat part is that this is all my music! I'm still learning more about this, but its pretty neat. Music was now taken care of.
Backups:
Syncing my iPhone and iPad to my local computer meant that I didn't need to backup to my free 5GB of iCloud storage. This storage is used up by photo stream and if you want to backup your device to iCloud. I decided to turn on the backup to my iCloud storage. What I found was that it took a few GB! This wasn't going to work. It did make me wonder where all the space was being taken up. Further digging revealed that 1.5GB of the 2.1GB was just my pictures! I turned off camera roll, and the resulting backup was about 650MB. This will work! The same held true for both devices.
This presented a problem - I needed a way to back up all of my photos. I'll cover this in my next blog about the storage.
The backups are kind of neat. When your device is charging and locked - the backup happens. I don't have to tell it to do anything. I like that. Every now and then I check the storage and backup (iCloud in settings) and see when the last backup happened. It makes me happy to see it there, and I didn't have to do anything.
The last part is the updates. Apple introduced over the air updates in iOS5. Plug into power, go to settings, click update and it does it. No problem!
The only thing I didn't try yet is to restore from the backup that is already out there. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it!
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