Not my experience. One time the hard drive of my Mac Mini crashed. I lost all my mp3s. Fortunately, they were all stored on my iPod, so I could just get them fr

Not my experience. One time the hard drive of my Mac Mini crashed. I lost all my mp3s. Fortunately, they were all stored on my iPod, so I could just get them from there. On Mac: There was an application that could do that, but Apple sued them and so was not available anymore. On Windows: Was not able to get those mp3's out (don't remember why exactly) On Linux: Was able to mount it and get those files out with some Open Source iTunes clone. At that point, I totally ditched Apple.