Yngvai X said:
I'm curious though, if theres any way to back it up? God forbid anything happened to the iPod where I'd need a new one, just the thought of having to re-rip my whole CD collection AGAIN makes me dread having to replace it.
Back up the iPod? I'm sure there is a way, but I'd go with backing up your original MP3's (from your computer)...FAR easier, and it will get stuff that's on your computer but not sync'd to the iPod (unless your iPod can hold your whole collection).
There's three basic ways to back it up:
1) Somewhere in the iTunes preferences it will show you where your Music is being stored on the computer (under the "Advanced" tab, probably). Use blank DVDs or CDs and simply back up the MP3s as you would anything else on your computer (this is trivial on a Mac, and *too* bad under Windows these days, depending on the software you have). Note that if you have many MP3s at all, you'll need a TON of CDs if you choose that format. Use DVDs if your computer has a DVD drive (holds about 7 times what CDs hold), or better yet, use double-layer DVDs *IF* your DVD drive supports them (most don't)...they hold twice as much as a "regular" DVD.
2) iTunes itself will let you burn MP3s directly to DVD or CD. Just create multiple playlists for what you want to back up (size each playlist so that it'll fit the disc), click the "Burn" button and insert a disc when it tells you. You might be able to do all your "A" artists on one disc, all the "B" artists on another, etc...break 'em up however you want. The down side of this method is that it doesn't preserve artist/CD folders, last time I used it, so if you do DVDs, you'll just have several hundred MP3s on the disc with no organization except a big damn list of files (this is why I choose #1). It works just fine as a backup, but I prefer #1 as it's more organized...makes it easier if you need/want to extract specific CDs vs. just doing a complete restore (I use my backup DVDs to transfer CDs to my work laptop).
3) Buy an external hard drive and drag the iTunes "Music" folder over.
Of course, all three of these require updating...once you've bought and ripped more CDs to your computer, you'll want to do an updated backup. Rather than re-burning 65GB of data, I just burn discs with the "new stuff." To do this, go to "Library" view, and make sure you have "All Artists" "All Artists" and "All Albums" selected if you use Browse view, then click the "Date Added" column header. Your songs are now sorted by the date you ripped them from CD. Select everything since your last backup and burn it to a new disc (this is easiest using method #2 above). Just as was the case with originally ripping all your CDs when you first got your iPod, doing the first backup will take a while if you have many MP3s, but once it's done, doing these "update" backups for new stuff doesn't take long (speaking of which, I'm probably due for one!).
BTW, if you did a backup to an external hard drive, you can actually drag from the selected list in iTunes over to the external hard drive (at least in the LATEST Mac version...not sure about other versions or on Windows). Granted, the songs won't automagically drop into their appropriate artist/CD sub-folders on the external drive, but at least they're backed up, right?

If you have to re-import the files into iTunes at some point, it'll figure it out when it imports it.
Send me a private message if you have questions on how to do any of this...I don't always keep up with replies in forum threads.
BTW...enjoyed the party with you, Noah, etc on Thursday night at PP7!!
Craig