can tunespan move my iphone applications to external drive?
Answered
Hi,
In addition to Music, Movies, Books, another directory of BIG files that iTunes manages (and in the same folder as Music, Movies) is "Mobile Applications".
That's where copies of my iOS apps are. For example,
-rw-r--r-- 1 sieler staff 1811845239 Feb 6 16:02 The Elements 1.3.0.ipa
(In /Users/sieler/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Mobile Applications )
Can tunespan move those, please?
If you can't do it your normal way, how about doing it by duplicating the directory structure onto my spanned target, copy the files, and replace the original files with symlinks to the new files?
And, how about moving my iPhone / iPad backup files? :)
E.g., Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/*
thanks,
Stan
The same question
Thanks for getting in touch.
This has been a highly suggested feature, and I would like to have it myself.
But, I'm sorry to say that there's nothing TuneSpan can do.
These files are not included in the XML iTunes Library file and don't respond to the same "set location" AppleScript command. So they can't be accessed or updated with TuneSpan the same way as regular media.
You're right that a symbolic link solution would be possible, and TuneSpan used to do more stuff with symlinks before the nice AppleScript command was available.
But, I moved away from that approach for many reasons. TuneSpans current approach is very clean with no long term overhead or maintenance. After spanning tracks, you could delete TuneSpan with no adverse effects. With symlinks, that would not be the case. In early versions of TuneSpan, there was a helper application that would add and remove the necessary symlinks when iTunes launched and quit so there were never any unnecessary stays on the system.
As for symlinking mobile apps, I'm not sure how updates would work since the file names change with each version, old stray versions would probably get stuck on the external.
You could try symlinking the whole Mobile Applications folder manually. That may work, not positive anymore since I haven't messed with that stuff since older versions of iTunes.
Personally, I decided to delete my local Mobile Applications long ago, and have not suffered for it. The only loss is apps don't get reinstalled automatically if you restore your phone. But, they can be redownloader through the phone.
As for Mobile Backups, that's another beast I've not researched and I would consider out of the scope of what I'm trying to do with TuneSpan.
But, I understand your frustrations. I wish the situation were different so that spanning mobile apps was as simple as other media.
Thanks for getting in touch.
This has been a highly suggested feature, and I would like to have it myself.
But, I'm sorry to say that there's nothing TuneSpan can do.
These files are not included in the XML iTunes Library file and don't respond to the same "set location" AppleScript command. So they can't be accessed or updated with TuneSpan the same way as regular media.
You're right that a symbolic link solution would be possible, and TuneSpan used to do more stuff with symlinks before the nice AppleScript command was available.
But, I moved away from that approach for many reasons. TuneSpans current approach is very clean with no long term overhead or maintenance. After spanning tracks, you could delete TuneSpan with no adverse effects. With symlinks, that would not be the case. In early versions of TuneSpan, there was a helper application that would add and remove the necessary symlinks when iTunes launched and quit so there were never any unnecessary stays on the system.
As for symlinking mobile apps, I'm not sure how updates would work since the file names change with each version, old stray versions would probably get stuck on the external.
You could try symlinking the whole Mobile Applications folder manually. That may work, not positive anymore since I haven't messed with that stuff since older versions of iTunes.
Personally, I decided to delete my local Mobile Applications long ago, and have not suffered for it. The only loss is apps don't get reinstalled automatically if you restore your phone. But, they can be redownloader through the phone.
As for Mobile Backups, that's another beast I've not researched and I would consider out of the scope of what I'm trying to do with TuneSpan.
But, I understand your frustrations. I wish the situation were different so that spanning mobile apps was as simple as other media.
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