Fatal Hard Drive Failure
Guess what happened to my PowerBook today?
Luckily, I am just about the poster child for frequent backups. Also, all my Atlas work (with the exception of e-mail) is on an external firewire drive. The only data I will have lost is e-mail that arrived after last Thursday or so (can't remember exactly which day I backed it up last week), and any personal files modified since then, with the happy exception of my morning writing, which I back up to flash drive every morning.
Still, this blows most heartily.
Comments
Aaaugh! I had a similar thing happen a couple of months ago - I now have a lovely useless piece of plastic and circuits, and am working on a loaner machine now. I feel your pain.
Serious bummer. You mave my moral support.
You poor bastard. You poor, smart, well prepared bastard. This story chills me to the core, as my backup routine is far less rigorous (i.e., kinda whenever I think about it - usually right after a major data loss event). Are you using any software to manage your backups, or just dragging files to backup disks by hand? We've all heard lately how heartily Apple's .Mac Backup app blows - I've read good things about a few others, but I'm always looking for ideas.
Also, I think I speak for the entire jefftidball.community when I say I'd like to get that poster!
Just had a similar meltdown. My amigos at mac-fusion.com got it back up and running in 48 hours and saved everything including email. Give me a hollar on the celly.
Ouch! Thank goodness for backups!
I have an old-school single-unit Imac in my classroom. Recently, OSX crashed horribly, and the tech people will be coming to take it away and reformat it soon. I have a bunch of stuff on the hard drive (pictures of kids, forms, lesson plans) that I want to save, and I suspect that even though the tech guy assures me he will back it all up I will lose some of it unless I do it myself.
A quick question for all the macheads: What file format does OSX use and what type of drive (EIDE, SATA, SCSI) is likely in an Imac? I want to stay late, crack open the case, and take the drive home to pull data, but I have little mac hardware experience.
Thanks.
Current Mac hard drives are ATA; that was probably the case with the iMac style you've got.
File format is probably HFS or HFS + something else (+extended, +journaling). I don't know a lot about flavors of HFS, save to know that all the stuff I read when I was dealing with my recent meltdown said that journaling was my friend, and that I should make sure it was turned on.
I've gotten a lot of useful information from the people on the Apple discussion boards (discussions.info.apple.com), and have tracked down lots of useful troubleshooting tips on Mac OS X Hints (www.macosxhints.com). The support area of Apple's website (www.apple.com/support) also has lots of old knowledge base articles, so they probably still have detailed technical information about the particular model you have (this one, right?).
Good luck!