How to Turn Your iPod into a Portable Hard Drive

I was pretty bummed that I got one of the last iPod's about a month before the digital video version came out. Once I stopped going to the gym on regular basis and listening to my iPod during my morning commute, it quickly became an expensive dust gatherer on my desk. Even my partner, who bought it for me, said that it seems a ridiculous waste to spend all that money and not have any use for it.

One day I was surfing the Apple website to look up some of the tech specs for the iPod and I accidentally discovered that my poor, neglected iPod can also serve as a mega-sized USB flash drive! I was already considering buying a USB flash drive because I'm constantly transferring large files from my home office to my day job, and burning the files to CD all the time is tedious at best.

Most of the USB flash drives with enough capacity to meet my needs were more than I wanted to spend on another tech toy. But, when I found out that I could use the extra space on my 30 GB iPod, I was ecstatic! The folder containing all my personal files on my iBook is about 6 gigabytes, so it fits nicely on the iPod without having to sacrifice my music or photo libraries.

The process is very simple and straightforward. Every time you connect your iPod via USB to your home Macintosh it automatically opens iTunes and syncs everything. Well, if you connect it to another Macintosh, the first think it will do is open iTunes and give you a message telling you that another computer owns your iPod. It also asks if you want to sync it to the computer you're currently hooked up to. Obviously, the answer is no...unless you want all your music and photo files deleted.

After that, you select the iPod icon in the Source panel. Then, click on the Summary tab. Select "Enable disk use" and "Manually manage songs and playlists" so that you can use your iPod as an external hard drive without losing your other files stored on there. In addition to transferring files, the iPod also makes a handy back-up device for your important personal files. This works for almost all iPod's except the iPod shuffle.

For special iPod Shuffle instructions on how to do this, check out Apple's website at: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61131