Crash landing

So, a few weeks ago I'm browsing for Tupperware auctions on eBay, here on my not-quite-two-year-old MacBook, when suddenly I get this spinning beach ball. Not too unusual, when you're paging through even a small part of the 250+ pages such a search returns.

Only trouble is, the beach ball won't go away. And then... the hard drive starts to click.

I won't bore you with all the gory details of my quest to recover something – anything! – from that clicking drive. Suffice it to say that it never booted again; that neither Apple's Disk Utility nor two different well-regarded Mac recovery apps could even see the drive, let alone find anything on it; that my last backup proved to be about two years old (i.e., the copy I made to transfer everything from my old TiBook to my new MacBook); and that quotes from reputable hard drive recovery services started at $700-$1000 (depending on whether clean-room work was needed). My files are valuable to me, but they're not quite that valuable.

After a long-shot attempt to use a DOS-based recovery app that has had success with Mac drives hooked up to a PC motherboard – but not, alas, with my Mac drive – I wrote off the drive as a total loss and gave it to friends who get their jollies experimenting with dead drives. They tried replacing the control board with one from an identical drive they got on eBay, but it still wouldn't run, and when they opened the drive and took a look at the platters, one had a neat, and very deep, groove in it, pretty much like the one in the photo above (which I found on Google images, since I didn't think to photograph mine).

Meanwhile, I installed a new hard drive twice the size of the original, and while I was inside the case I doubled the RAM. I then spent days reinstalling the system, installing all the outstanding system updates, and digging up and reinstalling all my apps, including several I had bought as download and had no restore media for. (Yes, yes, I know you're supposed to back the installers up to a CD or external drive! Just like I know you're supposed to back your @#$%&* document files up at intervals slightly shorter than two years.)

Then I restored my files from that two-year-old backup, and took stock of what I had lost:

• Two years worth of email (I keep everything) and about half of my address book.
• Two years worth of Firefox bookmarks, login IDs, and passwords.
• Bank and bill statements from all those online accounts that don't send hard copies any more.
• All the records of my 9-month job search in 2008, including resumes, letters, contact information, job-search-related bookmarks, and lots more. (And lest you think that's trivial, I should point out that I made good use of my 2005 job search records as a starting point for the 2008 effort.)
• Extensive financial/retirement calculation spreadsheets that are going to be a bear to reconstruct.
• All the records of several hundred dollars worth of eBay sales from the last year, plus my auction templates (I had put a lot of effort into refining my boilerplate copy and HTML formatting in the last few months) and quite a few photos I had stockpiled of items that I hadn't got around to putting up for sale yet.
• My iTunes library, though that is in fact fairly trivial, as it was all ripped CDs that I still own, not purchased tunes. Still, a bloody nuisance to redo.
  

And there's more, of course, probably some of which won't hit me until I find myself looking for something that's just not there, and realize it belongs to the Lost Era.

The one thing that, thankfully, I didn't lose is my photos. All my digital photos (except the eBay shots) are either on the two-year-old backup, or still on the original CF or SD cards. I knew there was a reason not to wipe those cards...

Anyway, in the time-honored tradition of locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen, I now have a free Mozy account that grabs my files and sends an encrypted incremental update up into the cloud once a day, whether I think about it or not. I'll also be burning CDs periodically and backing up to an external drive (yes, I do have one; in fact, I have three altogether, so why don't I use them?). And then, hopefully, I'll never have a repeat of this dismal debacle.