How not to loose my songs

Question

Hello,
In the past I have had to rebuild my PC's or reload something and in each case when I reload the Itunes software and then plug my Shuffle into the PC it states: The Ipod "Clays Ipod" is synced with another Itunes library. Do you want to erase this Ipod and sync with this Itunes library.
What can I do in order not to erase the songs on this Ipod? There is almost a gig of files on this shuffle and I was pretty anal about the choices I made. Is there no other way to do this without blowing everything away?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, a Shuffle (by design) can only be synced to one library at a time. If you change things--it thinks its a different library.
If I were you, I would print a list of the songs on my shuffle. Because of the 1 gb size limitation--(at MOST) a shuffle can contain 250 songs. So this isn't going to be a multiple-page list. (You'll print three pages of informaton, trust me.)
I think you can do this after you refuse the sync question that arises because it's a new library. Click on the device after it's plugged into your computer--view the contents (click on the "Contents" tab), then in the upper right corner, choose File>Print and then when this box opens choose Song Listing.
Now that you have a list of the songs on your Shuffle, you can create a Shuffle Playlist. (Pull all the songs listed on the shuffle playlist from your iTunes library onto this "reference" playlist.)
Now backup your entire library--playlists and all. To do this copy the iTunes music folder to another location--either separate hard drive, DVD(s) or multiple CDs. Once things are backed-up(and assuming nothing changes) you can simply drag the backup iTunes folder (or individual internal folders) back into iTunes if things get lost in the future. This will allow you to easily reload your shuffle!