The ominous clicking noise from my hard drive should have given me a clue. Backup was on my to-do list, but never a priority. That’s why I’m talking to you from August 8th, when I last copied my entire hard drive with Carbon Copy Cloner over to my glossy & beautiful Western Digital Passport 120GB USB drive. I’ve got amnesia in my exoskeleton. It’s horrible!
The sudden crash, inability for my laptop or a bootup CD or booting from another laptop in target mode probably means my data is intact on the drive, but the drive’s controllers are messed up. I got a quote over the phone from Drive Savers up in Novato; something like “600 to $3900”, with the low estimate being if they could only get a little bit of garbled data off and if they didn’t have to disassemble the drive. IntelliRecovery is in Hunters Point and cheaper – $400 to $1600. Can I justify spending $1000 for the last 2 months of my scripts, work data, email, book editing project, and music? It’s a close call, because that’s probably how much my time is worth to reconstruct everything and re-do all the work I’ve lost.
The evening of the crash, I took my MacBook to the Apple Store. They said it would be around $300 and 5-7 business days to send my laptop out and put a new drive in it.
The PowerBook Guy office just around the corner from the San Francisco Apple Store replaced my hard drive and gave it back to me in 2 hours. So I’m up and running again.
I think my future backup plans will be to do a full backup to my pocket hard drive every week as part of my work routine. And every night I will back up the work and book-editing files.
It was interesting to see what bits of the computer are crucial for me to feel comfortable. Firefox profile is way more key than I realized. Thunderbird profile is also very useful. Adium contacts. The keychain. My various .rc files. Ecto. My greasemonkey scripts and other python and Perl stuff for work. But with just the Firefox profile and a term window I can be up and running at a basic level from my own shell accounts (on pair and dreamhost). So now I’m trying to come up with some super basic set of “junk that I need” which I could carry around on my tiny flash drive.
Go and back up your data right now, by the way!
At our place we use Nero to back up selected folders on both our laptops (over the night). The nice thing is that it does a compare and only takes over changes so it saves on space and time (not that it matters since it’s set to excute overnight).
Anyway, glad your machine is up and running again!