How to Back up Your iPod — Without iTunes

Your precious iPod—your friend, your status symbol, your companion during good times and bad. It comes with you wherever you go; until one day, it disappears without a trace. Here's a cautionary tale, plus some tips on how to preserve your tunes if this nightmare scenario happens to you.

For me, there's no better time for cranking my iPod than while cruising at 35,000 feet; nothing whiles away the hours faster than dialing up a few podcasts or the odd TV show. But what if you leave your ice-white buddy on the plane? Not good. Unfortunately, it just happened to Shiny Shiny editor Susi Weaser, who had about 3,000 tracks on her iPod that weren't saved on her PC and now faces the task of rebuilding her extensive music collection from scratch. Ouch.

The moral of the story, of course, is to back up your iPod. Now, most of us essentially do just that every time we sync our iPods using iTunes, but if you're a power user like Weaser and you have untold thousands of songs on your iPod from multiple sources, the standard iTunes sync won't cut it. Luckily, The Gadgets Page has compiled a thorough list of iPod backup utilities that promise to keep your music safe and sound. Even better, these apps can transfer songs from your iPod back to your PC if, say, the hard drive on your system suffers a meltdown (which happened to me last year).

Just remember that these backup programs aren't sanctioned by Apple, and that using them to rip songs from your buddy's iPod to your PC or Mac is, of course, a no-no.