Using an iPod to rebuild your music library

Last week some family members suffered a corrupted hard drive on their only PC. They had no backup. They're relatively light computer users--no online banking, no important business documents--but the lesson still hurts. Their e-mail contacts weren't too hard to recover--they simply called everybody they had regular e-mail contact with and told them to send an e-mail. Their digital photos are gone forever, unless emergency tech support courtesy of their son-in-law produces a miracle. And their music library?

That's one nice thing about having a large-capacity MP3 player: if you're lazy about backup, at least you still have all (or most) of your tunes. The easiest solution for iPod users, in my opinion, is to use a utility like Music Rescue (I used it back when it was called iPod Util and highly recommend it) or 4Media iPod to PC Transfer for a Windows PC, or Senuti for Mac. Follow the instructions carefully--you don't want iTunes on your new replacement PC to try and automatically sync its (empty) library to your (full) iPod or you'll overwrite all the songs in their last remaining location!