Just wanted to let you all know

[realisticphish]

about a loss in my family.

Particularly, my Uncle Hard Drive. The doctors tried valiently, but they were unable to get any information into OR out of him.

So, we had him scrapped. I await my new uncle, but i will miss the 150 fucking gigabytes of music and movies that were in his brain.

note to self: BACK UP YOUR DATA

[elfin]

1. Ouch -

Been there - got very sassy after nearly 20 years of Apple - lost it all last summer. Now have a backup drive and am STILL scrounging around previous Macs to resurrect what I can.

I feel your pain.

[realisticphish]

4. i've been spoiled

with zero HD trouble. I have an external, but I used it for extra storage, not backup. Believe me, I've learned MY lesson

[onehandle]

2. A cat somehow knocked my wife's iMac off a table and onto the floor.

Back in April. The drive was active and dug in deep. I hauled it into the Apple Store for repair. They declared the drive "irrecoverable" and said they would swap in a new one under warranty. They said we had the option of sending the drive off to a recovery service. We declined. I've have that done before (paid for by office)...$1600-$3200. She hadn't backed up for a month or so, but that was good enough for her. The whole crisis took about three hours from cat crash to coming home with new drive in iMac.

[realisticphish]

3. I was still under warranty, thank god

and the shop I took it to has been great, but the drive is out of stock, so I'll have to wait until early next week.

In the meantime, I'm stuck on my parents' 700 mHz emac :cry:

[GoneOffShore]

5. I feel your pain -

the 40GB hard drive in my Powerbook G4 had severe hiccups last weekend - Booting in Safe Mode, from the install disk and even the VERY SCARY single user mode convinced me that it was a software problem. A trip to the Apple Store Genius bar proved me wrong - ARRGAHHH - as I hadn't done a real back up in about a month.

Dropped it off at the local Apple service center - I have an Extended Care Plan - and they're giving me a new hard drive - Yesterday they called and told me they recovered 28Gigs of the 31 gigs of data that was on it - Not sure what was lost. It still cost me $275 for the data recovery, in advance. I'm not sure if there are going to be any additional charges, but it looks like it's cheaper than shipping it to Drive Savers.

Backed up Mrs Gone off Shore's iBook to an external and will be doing that every week. And when I get mine back I'm going to buy another external and do the same. Luckily I had a lot of things on DVD and the external.

Now can someone tell me how to configure an external hard drive as a startup disk? Do I do an install using the Tiger DVD and then do the updates?

[realisticphish]

6. my HD

is gone, completely. They said that any data recovery would be hundreds of, if not a thousand, dollars. And, frankly, I'm not paying that much just to get my music and movies back

[GoneOffShore]

8. Look into Data Rescue II

from ProSoft. Ask them if they used that as it now seems to earning marks as the gold standard of data recovery tools.

It costs around $100.

[realisticphish]

9. well

the company doing it was simply unable to even TALK to the HD. He couldn't get anywhere past the opening blank unix screen. It sounds like a physical failure, and there's simply no access. But I'll mention it to him

[Ezlivin]

7. Real men don't do back-ups

That was an old saying coined by (I believe) Scott Knaster.

I used to do tech support at PCPC, the company that made the first hard drive and the first back-up software for the Mac (MacBottom and HFS Backup). I'd get occasional calls from frantic people saying things like "My entire business is on the hard drive. Can you help me?" My first question was always, "Have you made a back-up?" When the inevitable "No" came back, I could do nothing but tell them to send in their hard drive and let our techs see if they could recover the data. Naturally they wanted everything FedExed because of the critical nature and it was my luck to tell them that under warranty everything was shipped UPS Ground.

I don't miss that job at all. But I do back-up regularly and have never lost data in my 21 years on the Mac.

But real men don't do back-ups.

[benburch]

10. I have three backups.

Two live backup drives that are synchronized to the main drive on alternate days, and a DVD-R backup set that I make quarterly.