What if something goes wrong with the data on your computer's hard drive?

Hopefully you've learned to back it up in anticipation of this impending disaster. Given the state of the technology, it's not IF your hard drive will fail, it's WHEN it will fail. It's unnerving but you can be fairly sure that something on your hard drive will eventually become corrupted.

That's why it's so important to keep fairly current backups of the data you create such as the documents written, the accounting data, your emails, the pictures stored from your digital camera, the music downloaded and whatever else of which you would lament the loss. But what about the data on your iPod? You may not realize it but it's a computer too.

Just like a computer, iPods store their data on either a small hard drive or in flash memory. And just like in a computer, bad things can happen. When something goes wrong with your computer, you can turn to software utilities that will attempt to repair the problems. You also have utilities that can copy and move data, optimize your hard drives to work more efficiently, undelete accidentally erased files and so on. But for your iPod, if anything went wrong, you were out of luck. Until now. According to Prosoft Engineering, its TuneTech is the only comprehensive software utility geared specifically toward iPod users. Among it abilities is a way to recover lost or damaged music, repair corrupted data structures, backup your iPod to an exact copy, permanently delete unwanted files, and optimize the file layout of your music.

TuneTech is a suite of eight utilities that let you safely maintain the contents inside your iPod:

Backup lets you clone your iPod. This method lets you easily copy anything stored on the iPod including music, pictures and any other types of data files.

Optimize lets you defragment the data so that it is physically stored in a contiguous manner. Just as with your computer's hard drive, as you add and delete data, the information can become fragmented, with different pieces of a single file stored in many different places. This can increase the time it takes to get a single file and things can become bogged down. Having everything stored contiguously can increase battery life and in the case of the hard drive models decrease wear and tear.

Repair is what you use if a playlist becomes inaccessible due to software errors. Songs that are either missing or that play poorly due to some form of data corruption may be saved via this component.

Undelete lets you restore songs that you may have accidentally erased. This can save not only the song but how you may feel about yourself when you do something stupid.

Shred is when you absolutely want to insure that your data is gone forever after you erase it. The is especially handy if you ever decide to sell or donate your iPod and you don't want anything you had on there to fall into the wrong hands (or ears).

Duplicate is probably one of the most useful components in the entire suite.

It allows you to make an exact copy of your iPod's contents on another iPod.

This is especially handy when you've decided to buy a newer model and want to migrate everything from the old one to your new one.

Scan lets you do some preventative maintenance. It check out the hard drive's surface for any media defects that may cause problems in the future.

Info displays pertinent information about the hard drive that may come in handy with performing a diagnoses.

Currently TuneTech does not support the flash drive iPod models (iPod Shuffle and iPod Nano) but I am told they are working on a version that will. Also at this time, TuneTech works only on Macintosh computers running either Panther and Tiger. $59.