iPod Touch 5g battery died? How can I retrieve data?

[ForCryingOutLoud]

Sorry if this is a little bit long, but I want to be as descriptive as possible. Also, if this is in the wrong section, I apologize.

So, there's a glitch with the iPod Touch and iOS, I've searched it plenty of times, and as far as I'm concerned, nobody has posted the reason for this glitch, but plenty of people experience it.
Anyways, the issue is that iOS crashes or something when the iPod is locked and it doesn't wake up when you push the Home or Power/Lock buttons. In order to fix this in the past, all I had to do push the Home and Power buttons and then plug it in and it would reset. It was quick and easy. Then my Home button randomly broke, which sucks. So since the Home button broke, I've had this iOS glitch happen twice, and since I can't reset it with a broken Home button, I've waited for the battery to drain, which would usually take one to two days. After the battery drained, I would plug it in, it would turn on fine, and I would continue using it.

Now, on Monday at around 10 am, I noticed when I went to unlock and use my iPod, it wouldn't respond. So I got annoyed and thought "here we go again, no iPod for a day or two" and left it at that. It's been three days now and the battery hasn't drained. I'm paranoid. I think the battery might have died altogether because there's no reason at all that this battery shouldn't have drained already. It wasn't even fully charged when the glitch occurred. I'm paranoid because I have almost 700 pictures on there, countless number of important notes, and over a hundred songs. Despite my knowledge of these sort of things, I'm an idiot and my last backup was so long ago, so I can't even get a new one and restore it.
I'm at an absolute loss here. It's $99 to replace a battery and $99 to replace a Home button. I don't even care about the Home button, I just need the battery to turn it back on, backup the entire thing, then as far as I'm concerned, with as much issues as I've had with countless numbers of iPods and iPhones, I'm done using their stuff. I just want my pictures/songs/notes.

So the point of me posting this isn't to rant, but to ask instead if anyone has ANY ideas as to how to remedy this? I figure if the battery is dead, then you should be able to just plug it in and run off the power cord, similar to using a laptop with a bad battery, but when I plug it in, nothing happens. And if I can't get it to turn on, is there anyway I can remove the hard drive and connect it to something else to get the data off? Similar to hooking up the HD of a computer that won't turn on to another computer to back it up?

I'll take any advice or ideas. Even if the iPod is rendered unusable after getting the data off. I'm a college kid with no job, so I really don't want to spend $99 if there's another alternative. Thanks.

 

[saudor]

What do you mean the battery hasn't drained? Your files should be fine anyhow. But based on what you said, maybe waiting a bit more might drain it completely.

Alternatively there are cheap batteries on eBay but not sure if it's even worth it with a broken home button

 

[ApfelKuchen]

Have you plugged it into a computer, or just a charger?
Are you certain that a bad cable or charger, or debris in the Lighting port are not contributing to this problem?

Am I right to understand that you're assuming the battery hasn't discharged yet because it hasn't reset itself when connected to charger? If the thing had a decent charge when it locked up, it could take much more than a day or two for the battery to discharge - nothing is happening, so nearly no power is being used.

You could replace the battery and still not solve your problem - it's not certain that the battery is the problem. The Home button failure could be preventing it from starting up, then there's the bad cable/charger/connector scenario...

Do yourself a favor - bring it into a reputable repair shop and let them look at it - they should give you a free estimate. Hopefully, they won't listen to you if you say, "It needs a new battery" - a good diagnostician never trusts the customer's/patient's self-diagnosis.

You want a free fix and you want all your stuff preserved. While it's possible that there is a free fix (like learning a bad cable was your problem), it's also possible that there is not. It's possible that when the thing wakes up you'll discover it's already in Recovery Mode and has to be wiped anyway. You're hoping for a magic bullet, and there's just no certainty that such a thing exists.

In the end, either the stuff on the iPod means enough to you to risk some money on it, or it doesn't. If the stuff's truly valuable, $99 for a repair would seem cheap, no matter how broke you are. You might cut out soft drinks for a while, or the weekly night out with your friends, walk instead of taking the bus or buying gas... or :::gasp::: ask family or friends for help... it almost always comes down to priorities.

You've tied your hands by failing to backup. If you had a backup you could probably put the thing into DFU and get it working again. Make a note to yourself - regardless of whose product you buy next, back it up regularly. Everybody's computers crash (and regardless of what they're called, they're computers). It's part of what they do. With today's free, automatic cloud-based backups for iOS and Android devices, you have zero excuse for not doing this in the future.

When I was a kid, 700 color slides would have cost me close to $99 in film and processing costs. $99 in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Want to try adjusting that for inflation?

 

[TechFann]

Do you use iCloud? If you do, I would recommend turning on iCloud, creating an iCloud account and then have it sync every time it is plugged in and hooked up to wifi. That way your photos, notes, settings, etc are synced and backed up rather effortlessly. That is of course you can get the iPod to work correctly. Or you could even download the Google Photos app and have all your pics and videos sync to that.