On a recent MacMania cruise I attended I had the opportunity to learn , first hand , about the advisability of using an iPod shuffle as a USB key campaign .
In poor : Not such a hot mind .
As often find when geeks get together , files were being swap between a couple of colleague and they were using one person ’s make as the vehicle for quickly moving those Indian file between one PowerBook and another . After the windup of one such swap , Person A ejected the shuffle , passed it back to its owner , and when the iPod was plug away into Person B ’s laptop computer , the shamble ’s get - down Inner Light showed briefly and then flashed amber time and again .
Person C — a nearby instructor — pick up the telling wink light and pronounce , “ you may stop fiddling with it right now . I ’ve been there . It ’s all in . ”
Person D — the resident iPod expert ( me)—was call in , in the hope that they ’d missed some tiptop - secret way of accessing the iPod ( which , on the face of it , carried unique data point not on the proprietor ’s laptop ) . I sample :
1 . Switching the make on and off to reset it .
Nope .
2 . Mounting the iPod with Apple ’s Disk Utility .
Nuh uh .
3 . Looking for the drive in Apple ’s System Profiler .
It was there as a USB machine , but I already knew that . There was no way to manipulate the shuffle from within System Profiler .
4 . plug it back into Person A ’s PowerBook .
No dice .
5 . peruse the grizzly thing render to echo if there was some way to flip the shuffle into Disk Mode using a mysterious clit combination .
This is the one iPod that lacks such a clit compounding .
6 . Checking the shuffle withAlsoft ’s Disk Warrior .
The utility refuse to see it .
7 . Giving up on data point retrieval , plugging in the shuffling and attempting to furbish up it with the late iPod Software Updater .
Negatory . The software system also refused to spot the shuffling .
8 . Cursing like a sailor .
Did nothing for the shuffling but impressed a passing crew member .
To summarise up , the shuffling was dead , dead , dead and nothing I or anyone else could do was going to bring it back .
Lesson learned ? pay thatCostco will let you have a 1 GB USB keydrivefor around $ 50 , it strikes me that believe your data to a more complicated equipment that hold in not only a hunk of news bulletin memory , but a battery and circuitry to toy music , may not be the wisest course of instruction . Were I to use an iPod to hold a backup of important files — something I often do — I’d be sure that the files were duplicated elsewhere and that I used an iPod that was a bit more flexible in regard to data recovery ( meaning one that I could endeavor to mount by resetting and then hold down Center and Play when the Apple logotype appear ) .
