To save space on a shrinking hard drive, I keep none of my music on the computer, just the ipod. Occasionally I'll back up the iPod because otherwise all my music can go with a glitch in the firmware, or losing the iPod, etc. This is why I need iPod ripping software, which can extract from the iPod and onto an external drive.

This is the best genuinely free iPod access application I've tried, having tried many.

iPod Viewer: would always duplicate instead of skipping files when re-backing up (but was otherwise good)

Expod: was good but limited

iPod->Folder: had wrong progress reports, gave the songs four-character combinations and random folder allocation

Ollie's iPod Extractor: only extracts directly to iTunes

YamiPod: Not only does it copy quickly relative to others tried, but it also has a good level of customisation, I can copy them over as a load of songs, or categorised in Artist folders, categorised one deeper into Album folders, etc. And of course a vital function if you plan to back up again but not from scratch, just keeping the difference, there are options on how to respond to duplicate files.
It's simple, but at the same time has a host of options and functions, it works, and it's a nice clean interface.

I'll see how it compares to using iTunes, it has other built in functions such as a last.fm scrobbler and more.

I'm glad I kept looking, this was the application I needed to find.