has anyone has their ipod totally crash and lose all the data?

But thanks, I'll have it checked.

But it still works and I have no idea what my point is.

but im too lazy to go and find them

Case rested.

the point is that the ipod is still prone to problems despite its image as the most secure storage device ever produced.

Apple do a great job of handling s***-loads of repairs to keep consumers sweet & wishing them well, saying nice things in public, etcetera.

Not that it's exactly hard to get Apple-heads to say nice things about Apple products, the most difficult thing is getting them to say anything remotely rational and objective usually. Cos like Apple is so perfect & everything is SO sleekly designed and just... OMG I can't imagine any other way of doing things except what's put right in front of me and I'm told is the best way... /apple rage rising, must leave thread before explosion

Hard drive -> liable to flake out at any moment, if contact between head and disk is accidentally made. Highly unsuitable for use in a mobile product really, but somehow they work most of the time!

i had it freeze on m4a files with chapter marks (thanks the Ricky Gervase podcast) but that's about it. i damaged it once, apple replaced it when i bought applecare.

i'm first just giving it a few days to totally lose its charge, then recharge from dead and see if that gives any help.

http://images.apple.com/support/ipod/elements/banners/ipod_sadface.gif

also, sure sounds like you're projecting a bit, nancyboy.
i can feel your internet anger from here, and it ain't pretty

Also, how much would you guess you've spent on blank CDs/DVDs? $50? $75? Why not just spring for the extra $50 or so and have one little box for your backups instead of 25 discs lying all over your floor?

Then, if you're crazy paranoid like me, you can buy a second external drive and backup your first external drive... then unplug it and put it away in your closet until it's backup time again (approx 30 days/500 songs later, whichever comes first).

I've already had three hard drives fail on me -- it happens more often than you'd think for a lot of different reasons (the most common being how often they are formatted). iPod harddrives, while more durable because they were designed for laptops, are not really any less prone to failure, but usually the iPod is replaced before this becomes an issue. Not many people replace their laptops every two/three years (and they also don't dance around with them).

So there.

what i'm saying is that it's pretty much a commodity now, so there's no sense in crying over a few temporariliy going missing. i thought i'd be a lot more stressed out about my ipod crashing, but honestly, it's just an excuse to have fun loading it all up again, this time a bit differently than the last.

so stop trying to make it into a "i'm smarter than you" pissing contest. i'm not looking for sympathy, and don't really believe the original poster was either. we're both just commiserating with someone else who's going through a similar annoyance.

(2) that statement about shuffle wearing out the hard drive faster is absurd. while it's technically true that, all other things being equal, setting your ipod on shuffle MIGHT wear out your hard drive VERY SLIGHTLY faster than not having it on shuffle, in practice having the drive head move across the plate once every 3-5 minutes will have little to no effect on the life of your drive. what you need to worry about is dropping your shit or having it soaked. pretty much everything else is moot.

take your desktop hard drive: whenever you hear the drilling/grinding noise, that's your drive head moving across the drive, except maybe at the rate of 100 times a second. so each second of, say, windows loading is like 100 songs played on shuffle on your ipod.

(3) what, you don't have all your music on a five-drive raid 5 array with multiple offsite backups? i thought everyone did that...

(4) i have to say, the real solution is to have a huge music collection that your friends all covet, then have them all buy hard drives so they can share your joy. every time one of your friends wants to copy your entire collection, you have another backup of your music. if you're even semi-regularly backing up more than 5 gigs to cd-r's then you have too much free time.

i used to back up onto CDR but it was too much of a pain in the arse, and i began to run out of space quite quickly.

My main problem is that sometimes the iPod doesn't update properly when it's attached to my Mac -- has anyone else had that happen, where the iPod shows up but hangs instead of updating?

That's because the iTunes Library database file is written in XML which is known to be extremely unforgiving towards corrupted characters. That means if your Library file is, let's say, 56,000 characters long, and character number 237 is corrupted (a "4" instead of an "A") then the whole thing is unreadable. The solution is simple: periodically make a backup copy of your iTunes Library file.

Regarding rentboy's 1,500 backup CDR collection; wow. That's easily the most inefficient waste of time I've heard of all week. Maybe you could catalog them on microfilm while you're at it. It's supposed to last for a real long time I heard.

The irony here is that many of you will spend $300 on a 30GB iPod and then balk at paying another $100 for a 160GB backup drive to protect your investment (in music files, time spent ripping, etc.) That don't make no sense, man.

spending ~1 minute to set up a burn in Nero daily = omg teh CRUC14L w4ste of time!!

and since i got a dvd burner, i usually only burn a backup about once a week.

whatever, man. you're obviously smarter than me. and clearly more efficient with your time, since you have all this extra time to show random people on the internet just how much smarter you truly are.