iPod backup and restore question

I haven't quite found a good answer yet searching the forums for the question below. I know questions about moving songs off of the ipod have been answered before but i haven't gotten this totally figured out yet...

I would appreciate any suggestions for accomplishing this task:

I have an 8gb ipod nano which is full and which I manually manage from a much larger Itunes library. I would like to remove everything from the ipod Temporarily and replace with a long audiobook for an upcoming trip. When I’m done I would like to exactly replace everything I had on the ipod, essentially restoring it to it’s previous state. I would like to do this without having to go back and manually add all the songs I originally manually loaded onto the ipod (which took hours to do). Is there a way to copy or image the ipod onto another drive and then copy it back on like this? Or some other method that’s pretty quick? Any suggestions would be appreciated! Thanks!

 

Good idea and Thanks!

much appreciated
olds.cool