It's a work laptop and I have used up all hard drive space. I have a 250gb portable hard drive. Can I backup my library to that, delete from C: and just open the library in iTunes from the portable drive whenever I want?

yeah thats what i do, but once you've moved the fles onto the HD you might need to reload them onto itunes as itunes will be looking in the wrong location for the files.

Cheers. According to the iTunes support site, if you hold shift and open iTunes, it brings up an option for you to choose library. I guess you can then choose the external drive then.

Putting my IT Police hat on, if it's a work laptop, are they work files in your iTunes library?
Or do you have specific permission to store non-work data on your work computer?

Not every company has a policy against personal files on work laptops. We don't.

that's lucky, I suppose, for you, but potentially dangerous for your company; more to the point, though, could you live with losing your iTunes library if say you left the company or your work laptop died completely & got replaced – or, say, stolen from the boot of your car. You do keep it in the boot when on the move, don't you?

Personally speaking, I really wouldn't have my iTunes library on something belonging to work simply because the equipment may be taken away from me at any point either as an upgrade, or as I left the business, or even a disciplinary procedure.

Wearing much the same hat as john, I'd say your best "solution" is to put them on your own computer.

Else get an external drive and follow this: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1364

j_d, he's asked about moving his iTunes library off of his work computer, so your comment is totally spurious. As other more sensible comments have said, just copy the library across onto your external drive then get iTunes on whatever computer to look for the library on the external. There is software that allows libraries to be shared across multiple computers, this may be of help as well.

I'd just copy the library to the HD and then put a link from the local location on the pc to the HD. There's no need for the laptop to copy the library back across – just make sure you've got a decent speed external drive.

It's what I do with my itunes library – it's got a whole load of Disney films on it for the kids as well as music so over 100GB. Sits on an external drive and is then mounted across onto the laptop / mac mini etc. Easier to backup too – I've only got one library to maintain and ensure I've got copies off.

that's lucky, I suppose, for you, but potentially dangerous for your company;

In what respect? There are plenty of ways to control IT security without resorting to stupid levels of control on what people can install on their machine.

I keep a copy of my full iTunes library on several machines and also back it up to an external HDD.

well if you're keeping several copies then I suppose that's good practice 😉

I don't keep anything personal on my work laptop; partly because it's frowned upon, but mostly because I don't want to lose anything in the event of sudden "mend it with a new one" upgrades

I guess it depends how stupid the people in your organisation can be; some companies use the "nobody does anything or else" policy in case there are complete morons that surf the internet for pr0n – and download it – with company property whilst in hotels etc.

BTW I'm a programmer not an enforcer, but I can still remember when I was a sysadmin & had to enforce company policy – in a previous company wot I worked for.

We install tools on the work laptop to monitor any software installed (as much to ensure license compliance as anything else) and have the right (which has never been used so far) to monitor emails and web use if we want.

We also make sure anti-virus and updates etc. are kept up to date. Going further than that – restricting software installations etc. – is way too much of a headache in practice for us.