If you’ve been keeping up with the news, then you’ll know that US customs can seize and inspect anything on your laptop, without your consent or without probable cause.

There are many ways around this, including drive encryption or carrying a USB memory key. But those will always present the risk that Customs simply seize them too.

One place you may not have thought about for storing documents is your iPod. Apple conveniently allow iPod owners to enable a portion of the drive on their iPod for non music/video storage, and access is as simple as opening it up in Explorer. Of course, if the documents are of a really sensitive nature, then you’ll want to store them in a Truecrypt file.

Of course, this system also works if you just need a quick and dirty way of storing anything else you need a backup of (photos for example).

You can learn more about enabling disk usage on an iPod in this Apple knowledge base article.