Given the praise heaped upon the iPod for its musical capabilities, it's easy to overlook the fact that it's more than a music player equipped with a hard drive. The iPod is also a capable FireWire/USB 2.0 drive that happens to play music. This distinction may not seem terribly important until the day you're sitting in front of an Apple PowerBook whose hard drive has suddenly gone south while your co-workersmany of whom have flown in from overseasanxiously await the now-vanished PowerPoint presentation you slaved over for the past six weeks.
If you'd set aside a portion of your white iPod for a system capable of booting your Mac and a teensy bit more room for a copy of PowerPoint and that presentation, what could have been a disaster would turn into an opportunity to demonstrate why you're more deserving of an executive parking space than that schlep Henderson, who smells of garlic and routinely pinches your yogurt from the office mini-fridge.
And although Windows users can't boot their PCs from an iPod, the iPod can still serve as a useful backup and storage solution for those who are not running the Mac OS.
In this chapter, I'll show you how the iPod operates as an external storage device, how you can exploit it in this regard, andyeshow to move music off your iPod and onto all the computers you own (as well as discuss the moral ramifications of doing so).