So it's time to replace my four year old MacBook Pro with a Retina MacBook Pro, and I'm trying to figure out how big an SSD drive to get.

For people who have large music and/or movie and TV collections in iTunes, do you keep them all on your primary computer? Or store much of it some external drive or in the cloud? What if your primary computer is a laptop?

I'll need the 1 TB SSD if I want to continue to keep all my iTunes media files on the new laptop.

I have a 4TB NAS that holds all my media. (And upgrading to Mavericks has - fingers crossed - solved the issues I was having with iPhoto constantly crashing.)

Jessica, do you use a laptop or a desktop computer with your NAS drive? I think iTunes doesn't like not being able to find files on an unavailable external drive (or if they're just missing) when using the iTunes cloud.

My iTunes library isn't very large, but the only way I carry it around is on my iPod, so there's no reason to have it on my laptop (the "house" library actually runs off the desktop). I can point different applications at the folder structure too, which can be handy, if iTunes isn't going to be the only way I access it.

My movies take up much more space, and those are on the network too. I only copy up what I need to be mobile to whatever device is going mobile.

Jessica, do you use a laptop or a desktop computer with your NAS drive? I think iTunes doesn't like not being able to find files on an unavailable external drive (or if they're just missing) when using the iTunes cloud.

DH and I both connect with our laptops. The only hiccup is making sure the drive is mounted before starting up iTunes (otherwise it helpfully creates a new local library with all of your media missing).

I haven't set up Cloud or Match or whatever, so I'm not sure how that would be affected.

Hmm. Even with a 1TB drive I'm going to have to bite the bullet sometime and start using NAS storage for much of my media files. Maybe I'll keep putting that off as long as I can....

Maybe I'll keep putting that off as long as I can....

Why? I mean, it's easiest to start when you're setting up a new main computer. And it really is handy.

How do you back up now?

Why?

Laziness? I just like having everything on my main computer. Although with iTunes Match I don't really need to anymore.

I mean, it's easiest to start when you're setting up a new main computer. And it really is handy.

Good point--I'll have to think about it.

How do you back up now?

A 2TB Time Capsule.

I have a 4TB drive connected to the iMac on my desk in the office. That is where the iTunes library is housed. It's close to full and I think I'm going to need to migrate to a desktop Drobo for this soon. About 27,000 of my music tracks are also in the iTunes Match system so that I can get them from my Laptop or iPhone as needed. I have another iTunes library on the studio iMac that has around another 15,000 tracks that I didn't want to sync with Match. All of these are accessible from the Apple TVs in the household, as well as from all of the computers.

I cobbled together my network solution, but in the end, I can access all my tracks directly via the desktop whose library it is (ergo iTunes on all authorised machines), the Apple TV, and Twonky (ergo all the UPNP devices). I've not actually looked into Match.

A 2TB Time Capsule.

Ah, I see. I'm running both OS X and Windows backups to one of the NAS devices, so it's part and parcel of the same thing. Some irritation getting AFP to play nicely, but the QNAP seems to be best suited for it. I wish one of my network storage devices did everything well, so I could consolidate, or the strengths were distributed enough that each could have its own separate function, but I'm a ways away from that.