Anybody here lived through the Discman era?

[Orbert]

It sounds like when the error came up, something had already been corrupted.  If you Cancel out of the Restore operation, it should have just aborted and left things alone.  Your file system was probably already hosed by that point.  Rebooting got your operating system back, but the hard drive contents were toast.

I use a free third-party program called SharePod.  It allows you to back up your iPod contents to your PC.  In general, it's nearly impossible to do manually that because everything on the iPod is "coded".  The titles are all hashed, supposedly so that you can't just copy contents from one iPod to another because of copyright protection blah blah blah.

Anyway, SharePod has a range of options and settings, so what I do is have it automatically create subfolders for Genre, with Artist within that, and Album within that.  Files saved to the hard drive can be named by any combination of Title, Track Number, Artist, etc., so I just go with Track Number and Title, since they're already in folders by Album.  This also makes it really handy to play tunes from the PC, or (ta-da!) transfer tunes to another iPod.

I'm not sure if sharing the website for it is okay here, but I'm sure a Google search would turn it up pretty quickly.  PM for more, if you need it.

[TAC]

O, I downloaded it and it's currently running. Like an idiot, I should have tried copying 10 songs, but I'm transferring the contents of my 30G iPod back into iTunes. I'll see if it all went through when I get home from work tonight.
Thank you very much!

[Orbert]

No problem.  I've been using it for years now and love it.  The interface is a bit funky, but I can work with it, and for what it does, the price was certainly right.

You're right in that you might have picked a few tunes to back up first, make sure you know how all the options work and that it'll create the folders the way you want, but hey, it's a learning experience.

[lonestar]

I had a 8-track mono speaker portable player before the cassette player then the CD Walkman.  Yeah, It was "DYNOMITE!!"

Old Farts will get that joke.

I don't get the opportunity to say this often, but fuck man, you're old.

Fucking fell out of my chair on that one.

Never had a portable 8-track, but definitely remember the Sony Walkman.  That was the shit.

Hef, I had the JJ Walker endorsed 8-Track player.  No Joke.

Was that the one Rerun got busted bootlegging the Doobie Brothers with.

[King Postwhore]

 

[TAC]

Hey O, IT WORKED!! Thank you very much. At least I got 30gs of the basics onto my iPod. Still a lot of work to do to get it filled where it was, but I'm OK with that.

[Orbert]

Cool, I'm glad it worked.  And now you have a tool to back up your iPod.