80. Use Your iPod as an External Hard Disk BEFORE YOU BEGIN 42 Transfer Your Music to Your iPod SEE ALSO 79 Download Photos from Your Camera to Your iPod Photo 83 Transfer and View Contacts 86 Transfer and View Text Notes Ever since the iPod's original 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. By connecting it to the computer over FireWire (and, later, USB 2.0), an iPod serves as 5 to 60 gigabytes of portable storage space, enough 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 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 98 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 is put there by software. 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. 1. | Connect Your iPod Connect your iPod to your computer using the Dock or cable. Wait for it to finish synchronizing its information. 80. Use Your iPod as an External Hard Disk | 2. | Open the iPod Preferences Choose iTunes, Preferences on the Mac or Edit, Preferences in Windows to open the Preferences window. Click the iPod tab, then (for all iPods except the iPod shuffle) click the Music tab from the tabs 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. | 3. | Enable Disk Mode Select the Enable disk use check box. NOTES If you enable Manual sync mode (see 43 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 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 should be used for music, and how much for data. ( Full- size iPods automatically use all available space 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. | 4. | Use the iPod as an External Disk Copy files to and from the iPod as an external disk, as you would any other disk. For instance, you can keep a copy of your r sum on your iPod shuffle, or a folder full of favorite pictures on your iPod mini; 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. | 5. | 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. On 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 it. | |