Please give me your insight

Its possible the case could damage the iPod.

Since the hard drive uses magnetism to store the info, any magnetic field around the HD strong enough will alter its magnetic charge.

Is the field produced by your case strong enough to affect the HD? No way to guess. I just believe in playing it safe and never bringing a magnet close to a HD.

No problem. I doubt the guys at Best Buy will know. I have never been wowed by their tech savvy.

They never seem to know the answer. Thats what you get when you employ 18 year old kids in an electronic store.

As for your case, my GUESS is that you will be ok. I can't see them putting magnets on the case so strong to disrupt the HD when they are only used to keep the flap shut.

The problem is you can't practically 'insulate' a magnet. It has a magnetic field, the strength or weakness of which will depend on how strong the magnet is itself, but if the iPod's hard drive is within the magnetic field, it will suffer some damage, even if very slight. The sort of damage is important to be aware of though, because except in very unusual circumstances we're not talking about a hardware failure. What happens is that over time, as the drive sits in the magnetic field, the field gradually realigns the particles on the drive surface to fit the pattern of the field. Those particles are, for want of a more technical description, your data - so over time your data gets gradually scrubbed off.

However, data is digital not analog, so rather than fading like a picture in sunlight, it gets prone to increasing levels of error, though the drive itself is mechanically, physically and electrically fine.

All you need to do to keep your data safe is occasionally re-write it, because that puts back the original pattern of particles, and starts the 'fading' process from the beginning again.

How often you might need to do that depends on how strong the magnet, which you can get some idea of by how strongly it seems to snap shut or how much effort it takes to open it. The stronger the magnet the faster the wiping of data would be. At worst however, you would only have to restore your iPod via iTunes (same process as restoring the iPhone) and put your stuff back on.

It's also worth remembering that the earth itself has a magnetic field that does the same thing to drives. If you left your iPod in one place long enough, the earth would erase your data just like the magnetic clasp would!

It's funny, in the bad old days of floppy disks, people who kept them stored in metal filing cabinets often complained that they seemed to go faulty, leaving the files on them unrecoverable. It was sometimes due to bad disks of course, but often due to the accumulation of magnetic field on the cabinets themselves as the cabinets sit still in the earth's magnetic field, which then began to slowly 'fade' the data off the disks, and often even the directory and formatting of the disk itself. TVs, computer monitors (at least the old CRT types), old style telephones, power supplies... many things are actually capable of generating pretty strong magnetic fields - the reason it isn't a common problem is because unlike early magnetic media, the modern stuff allows data to be written 'stronger' (mostly meaning more density of particles more accurately aligned) thus requiring larger magnetic fields to damage it.

It should be OK to use the case, yes, unless the magnetic clasp is so strong it snaps shut and takes effort to pry it open again. Some modern magnets can be very small but incredibly strong! Still, yes, if you noticed any errors reading the iPod, reconnecting the iPod and ensuring the data is re-written would resolve the problem, and if not a full restore would do the trick.

If you have a compass (a rarity these days I imagine unless there's a boy scout in the household) you can get a sense of the strength of the magnetic field of any object by seeing how near you have to be to it before the needle swings to point to it. You'd find that for many old-style TVs, being in the same room is enough, and some even exert an influence from much further away!

where is the duck and the rude tude nickshred