Many people have gone out and purchased an iPod Shuffle, or Nano. Both of these portable media players are quite nice and very sleek. It seems that all of the kids have to have one these days. However, whether it is your own iPod or your child’s there are a few occasions where you might find that you have a need to backup the music and videos stored on your device.
The most common trouble I have come across is when a PC gets a virus, hard drive fails, or some other catastrophic malfunction happens where the Operating System must be reinstalled. Another instance might be where the user has purchased a new computer and the old computer was discarded without saving the iTunes library first. Believe me it happens and we all make little mistakes that we regret later. These are issues where the entire iTunes library might not be recoverable and inevitably the iPod must be synced. Unfortunately, when syncing your device through the iTunes software it will erase all media files on your iPod and then there is no way to recover them. In this tutorial I will explain a simple way in which you can backup your music files on your device to your PC before you sync it with iTunes.
In the iPod shuffle you will see “iPod_Control” and then “Music” and some folders that may be labeled as F00, F01, F02, or some other combination and it is possible that you may have more depending upon how much you have stored on your device. Unfortunately, I do not have an iPod Nano to use in this tutorial, but I do know that the file structure is similar and you should be able to navigate to the music and video files with little or no trouble. As for myself I find it simpler to just copy the entire Music folder to My Music folder. The one thing that you must know is that the files you have copied to your hard drive cannot be copied directly back to the device. These files must be processed by the iTunes software.
First, remember those folders that you copied to your “My Music” folder? Well, now you must navigate to them and change their attributes. Do not worry it is not as scary as it sounds. Simply go to “Start” “My Music” and right click on the “Music” folder. Then from the popup menu click on properties. Then make sure that the “Read Only” and “Hidden” checkboxes are unchecked then click “Ok.” Then you will want to click on the radial button that reads “Apply changes to this folder, subfolders and files.” Now these files can be processed by the iTunes software and just in case you do not care for the way they are named and you cannot recognize the names of your MP3s, do not fear, iTunes will rename them for you to their original and recognizable names.
I hope that this tutorial has been helpful and that it may have given some insight into other things that you might be able to do with your iPod and PC combo. It is possible that there might be some third party software that might be available to do this for you. However, if you are like me you do not want to pay for some software that does what you can do yourself and you certainly do not want to install any free software on your PC that might contain Trojan viruses and Spyware then this is the way to go.