Section 88. Use Your iPod as an External Hard Disk


88. Use Your iPod as an External Hard Disk

Before You Begin

See Also

Transfer Your Music, Videos, and Podcasts to Your iPod

Download Photos from Your Camera Directly to Your iPod

 

Transfer and View Contacts

 

Transfer and View Text Notes


Ever since the first iPod's introduction in 2001, even those few people who were unimpressed with it as a music player immediately saw its usefulness in a more general sense: as an external hard disk drive. When you connect an iPod to the computer over FireWire or USB 2.0, it serves as 5 to 60 gigabytes (GB) of portable storage spaceenough to hold anything from a collection of movie clips or business documents to a complete operating system installation that can be used to boot a series of computers in a lab. Today, as always, the owner of an iPod can use part of it to store and play back iTunes music and videos, and fill the rest with whatever files she wants to carry with her in her travels.

Many of the iPod's extra features (text notes, contact information, synchronized full-resolution photos, and so on) take advantage of its secondary guise as an external hard disk. Although you can't access the music files on an iPod without special software (see Copy Your Music from the iPod Back to iTunes), special folders on the iPod's disk are used for certain specialized kinds of information that you place there manually or that software puts there. Whether you have a full-sized hard-disk-based iPod or the "keychain USB drive" iPod shuffle, this task explains how to unlock this side of your music player's personality.

Use Your iPod as an External Hard Disk


Connect Your iPod

Connect your iPod to your computer using the Dock or cable. Wait for it to finish synchronizing its information.

Open the iPod Preferences

Choose iTunes, Preferences on the Mac or Edit, Preferences in Windows to open the Preferences window. Click the iPod tab, and then (for all iPods except the iPod shuffle) click the Music tab from the subtabs within the window, if it's not already selected. This action displays the iPod's general configuration options.

Note

If you're using a version of iTunes before 4.8, click the General tab within the window to access the iPod's general configuration options, as described here.


Enable Disk Mode

Select the Enable disk use check box.

Notes

If you enable the Manually manage songs and playlists sync mode (see Use a Large iTunes Library with a Small iPod), the iPod is automatically put into disk mode and must be manually unmounted before you disconnect it. Also, if you switch back to one of the two automatic sync modes (synchronizing all your music, or synchronizing only specified playlists), you must manually disable the Enable disk use option to make the iPod unmount automatically after synchronizing with iTunes.

You might want to prevent iTunes from launching automatically every time you connect your iPod, particularly if you've enabled disk use. Disable the Open iTunes when this iPod is attached check box to accomplish this.


If you're using an iPod shuffle, use the slider below the Enable disk use check box to define how much of the 512MB or 1GB of disk space should be used for music, and how much for data. (Other iPod models automatically use all available space that's not used for data to sync music.) If there's already music filling your iPod shuffle and you reduce the amount of space available for music, you'll be asked whether iTunes should remove enough music from the end of the playlist to make room for the specified amount of data.

Click OK. The iPod becomes enabled as an external disk and appears mounted on your computer among the other disks.

Use the iPod as an External Disk

Copy files to and from the iPod as an external disk, as you would to and from any other disk. For instance, you can keep a copy of your résumé on your iPod shuffle, or a folder full of favorite pictures on your iPod mini (even if that iPod model can't display the pictures). Simply connect the iPod to another computer to access those files.

Note

If the other computer has iTunes installed on it, it might launch and ask you whether you want to delete all the music from your iPod and sync it with that computer instead. Click No to prevent this from happening.


Unmount the iPod's Disk to Disconnect

From now on, the iPod does not automatically unmount from the computer when it's done synchronizing with iTunes, as it did before. Now, before you disconnect the iPod from the computer, you must unmount it as you would any externally connected disk. If you don't unmount the iPod, you risk data loss or corruption.

In Windows, right-click the Unplug or Eject Hardware icon in the System Tray, open the window showing connected devices, select the iPod, and click Stop. On the Mac, drag the iPod's icon to the Trash (which becomes an Eject icon). Alternatively, click the Eject icon next to the iPod's name in the Finder's sidebar, or right-click in Windows or Control+click on the Mac the iPod's name and select Eject "iPod name" to unmount it. When the Do not Disconnect icon disappears from the iPod's screen, it's safe to unplug your iPod.

Note

Like many of our most useful technologies, iPods can be used for good and for evil. An unscrupulous iPod owner might use the device to steal digital data from someone else's computer. Consider a display computer in a store with a copy of Microsoft Office, or a PC in a workplace that has sensitive business files stored on it. A visitor with an iPod and a USB cable can mount it, copy the files to it, and leave before you know what happened.

If you're interested in defending your computer against "pod slurping" (as this unsavory activity is known), you can do so with simple practices such as setting a password on your screensaver and making sure it kicks in after only a few minutes of idle time.





iPod + iTunes for Windows and Mac in a Snap
iPod + iTunes for Windows and Mac in a Snap (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0672328992
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 150
Authors: Brian Tiemann

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