How to Backup your Ipod without using any external Programs

I keep hearing all of these horror stories of people who have not backed up their Itunes libraries and all of their music is on their Ipods.

Then their Ipod stops working/breaks/gets stolen/gets lost. I am going to present to you an extremely easy way to back up your Ipod. The only thing you will need are DVD''s to burn the files to, or an external hard drive.
Note: this is only for Windows. The Mac instructions are posted elsewhere on this blog.

1. The first thing that has to be done is to locate the music on your Ipod in My Computer. This can be done by clicking in the Ipod icon in My Computer (just as a side note the Ipod should be plugged into the computer for the entire process). There should be an icon that says "Ipod control." If there isn't, located at the top of the window click Tools>Folder Options. Click the "View" tab, and go down to where it says "Hidden Files and Folders." Make sure that line that says "Show Hidden files and folders" is clicked on.
Now go back to the Ipod folder and the icon "Ipod Control" should be located there in a lighter yellow from the folders around it.

2. Now click "Ipod Control>music." This will bring you to a lot of folders that start with the letter "F." I'm assuming that this refers to the Drive letter. My Ipod is drive 'f' so I''m assuming that most others are, but the letter isn't important, it's the numbers that are.

3. Now is when you can start backing up your music. If you are burning DVD's, open the program that you use to burn CD/DVD's (I like to use DeepBurner mainly because it's free and it works) and simply drag the folders from the Ipod into the burn list. You can burn about 10 folders for each DVD.
If you are backing up to a hard drive simply drag and drop the folders onto the drive.

Now you're done! You're current library is backed up, but I would highly suggest you have some sort of schedule to back it up in the future.

The only downside to this procedure is that you can't go and take individual songs off of your backups. Apple makes very obscure titles for the file names even though the Track information is the same as it would be on your Ipod. Now we'll talk about getting the music back onto you're new/refurbished/memory-wiped-clean Ipod.

5. To get music back onto the Ipod simply plug the empty Ipod into Itunes, adn drag-and-drop all of the music from the folders into The 'music' part of the Ipod.

NOTE: This will work for all movies that were backed up as well.

So hopefully now you'll fell a little bit more comfortable with the knowledge that all of the music on your Ipod has been backed up.