How to stop iTunes from reverting to the local disk

I don’t have enough disk space on my MacBook Air. So specifically I don’t want iTunes to occupy lots of it. I’ve my iTunes library on an external disk, which is fine until I happen to start iTunes without having that disk attached. In that case, iTunes will silently revert to using its default, internal storage location, and next time I import music, I’ll just not notice – and end up with a complete mess. For example, the media library location I am using resides on a server that is also used by my Sonos installation – and I’ve ended up swearing at Apple for making things easier than necessary when importing a CD and then still not seeing it in my Sonos library – because I had really imported it into my local music library which iTunes had reverted to at some point.

So here’s how to fix that.

I’ve replaced the link that normally gives iTunes writes to, by something that’s not blocking it from doing so:

mnott:iTunes mnott$ pwd
/Users/mnott/Music/iTunes
mnott:iTunes mnott$ ls -latr
total 10424
----------   1 root   1002         0 25 Okt  2014 iTunes Music
----------   1 root   1002         0 25 Okt  2014 iTunes Media

The reason for doing so is that I keep my media library on an external disk, but if I happen to start iTunes when I don’t have that disk attached, iTunes will silently revert to its default internal folder (see above), and next time I import some music, I’ll have a mixed up library. The above settings for the files are done like so (I’ve moved them to an external location first, so I can just remove them here – make sure you did do a backup):

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