Itouchmytouch

After carefully backing up all the music and vids to my ipod with CopyTrans . I played around with the 2.0 firmware for a little while. I then decided things appeared stable, so I copied all my music and videos back to my ipod. Realizing I was running out of room on my laptop I felt things were stable on my ipod and decided to delete my backup (you can see where this is going)

I then went crazy installing applications on to my ipod from the apps store. The great new 2.0 firmware had me trying to put everything under the sun on my ipod. I came across a free app called Netnewswire. It was an offline rss reader for the iphone/ipod. It syncs with feeds from Newsgator which is a total bonus for me because I use Newsgator as my web based rss reader. I installed the application and got it to sync all my feeds BIG MISTAKE. As I found out after the fact you can select feeds to sync to your netnewswire app from the Newsgator website. Something I should have done right from the beginning.

The feeds took well over 20 minutes to sync and after it was complete my ipod felt a little sluggish. I didn’t think anything of it at the time until I went into the settings and there was nothing but a blank screen. I decided at this point to power of the device and power it back on. When I powered it back on I was greeted with the lovely Apple logo for well over five minutes. I  then thought something is wrong so I powered it off and on again.
and waited…
and waited…
and waited…

Only to see the once lovely Apple logo turn into a symbol of my worst nightmares. After numerous power off and power ons, all getting the same result. I decided it was time to do a system restore and recover from the backup, except I had just DELETED the backup!
I accepted the fact I was more screwed then a hooker at an army base. So I began copying songs to my computer to put back on my ipod. I thought about how much of a drag this would be as I had album art, album names even some song lyrics for the music that was in my ipod. plus I couldn’t even remember half the songs I had on my ipod. I manually manage my itunes music and drag and drop music into my ipod from various sources so syncing my itunes library would get me nowhere.
As a last ditch effort I decided to plug my ipod into my computer and fire up CopyTrans. To my astonishment CopyTrans detected the files on my ipod even though my ipod was stuck at the Apple logo screen . It appeared the file system had gotten corrupted and CopyTrans could only read what was on my ipod for 5-6 minutes at a time, but that was better than nothing. So for the next several hours here are the steps I took

1. Power on my ipod
2. Plug it into my computer
3. Open CopyTrans
4. Backup 10-15 files to my computer until CopyTrans was unable to read my ipod anymore
5. Unplug my ipod
6. Power it off
7. Repeat steps 1-6

Doing this, I was able to copy all my files from my ipod even though it was stuck on the now evil looking Apple logo screen! I then performed a system restore and am now syncing back everything. So what did I learn from all this

• CopyTrans is the single greatest piece of software I have ever purchased in my life
• Always keep a backup of your ipod handy
• Keep the number of feeds in your offline rss reader app to a minimum
• CopyTrans is the single greatest piece of software I have ever purchased in my life

It was quite an experience. I have now decided to keep a permanent backup.

Back to the app store I go!