More iPod tips and tricks for OTR fans: Part 3

Hopefully you have already read all of the tricks/tips (there are several articles)  regarding my special tricks and tips for old-time radio fans.

Here's another good one:

If you are like me, you have an iPod that holds 250 gigs (actually more like 234 gigs) of stuff.  One my 7th generation iPod, I have a few video episodes of Dragnet on there and my entire OTR collection.

Until recently, I never even bothered saving my collection to hard disk.  Yes, it does reside on stacks of CDs and DVDs but I was not keen on using 200 gigabytes on the computer to store OTR.

Well with this trick, you can use your iPod to not only play your stuff but to store your stuff.  I'm talking about that well-known trick: How to use your iPod as a storage device, either.

Here's what you do:  if you have a large iPod (or large enough to carry your entire collection) fill up your iPod.

Now head over and get the tiny program called, "iDump."   iDump is a German-made freeware program that will dump the contents to your hard drive, so you never really have to have a backup on your hard drive.  (I would advise always keeping your stuff on CD or DVD though, unless you relish the thought of having to download everything again in case something happens.)

There are a couple of things you must know about iDump:

1.  Make sure your iPod is plugged into your computer.
2.  Close everything down except iTunes.  You can leave your resident programs running, though (resident programs are those that run by your clock in the Windows operating system.)
3. Run iDump.  (iDump has no installer program, it is what it is.)
4. iDump will take a while to scan your iPod.  Up to a hour or more if you have a big iPod.
5.  If you run anything at all while it is scanning, it will crash.  Trust me.  Read this again: if you open anything at all while iDump is running, it will crash.  And when it crashes, you will have to start all over and that's a big bummer.
6. After it has finished scanning, you can open up all kinds of windows and run all kinds of things.   Now, you can "dump" whatever you need to your hard drive.  Be sure you pick the second tab to tell the iDump where to dump the stuff. "X"  the boxes of the files you want dumped.

iDump is one of the nicest little free programs you will ever find.  It's not very stable as I mentioned but it is free and it does work if you follow my guidelines.  And it can save you 230+ gigabytes of hard drive space!

©Jimbo 2010/2011