Yesterday I while attempting to rename some video files in iTunes, I found that it hangs the whole iTunes apps for several minutes before the operation is complete. Why should this take so long?

To cut a long story short, I ended up with a corrupt iTunes Music Library file, resulting in iTunes crashing every time I tried opening it. Luckily I have been backing my entire home folder up on a weekly basis, so I don’t have to worry about loosing too much.

I do this by zipping my entire home folder into a gzip file, and storing it on my samba server. The terminal command I use for this is as follows.

$ sudo tar -cvzpf /Volumes/backup_location/backup/todays_date.tgz /Users/username

That is intended to be all on one line, copy and paste will pick this up. You’ll be prompted for an your administrator password, then it will get to work. Insert your own location and username to complete this. If you have many users you can always zip the entire users folder. The date is just a personal preference so I can keep several weeks worth of backups.

This has saved me once so far, and is definitely worth doing.