Stuck In Recovery Mode

My sister has a 4th gen. ipod touch. Since she got it, she never set up itunes on her computer. She's used my itunes to put music and videos manually onto her ipod. I have my own itouch that's synched with that itunes though. She asked me to put music on before she goes on vacation and when we plugged her ipod in, it popped up about updating to IOS 6.1. She told me she couldn't update the IOS from her ipod because it wouldn't let her so I clicked to run the update on the computer. We did not back up her ipod because I did not want her back up to overwrite my own ipod's back up. It was updating fine but then it said there was an error with the update. I wanted to try a second time to see if it would work but then the ipod got stuck in recovery mode and the only option it's giving me is to restore it. She doesn't want to lose her data because she does not have it backed up anyway and she wanted to know if there was an alternative to getting it out of recovery mode without losing the data before having to restore it. We tried to get it out of recovery mode with the Home and Sleep buttons but that didn't work.