OK, it finally happened to me … my Powerbook G4 hard drive bit the dust, hard.
It’s certainly beyond the hope of recovery with software disk tools – Disk Utility was a joke, and DiskWarrior beat on it for a couple of hours before giving up in despair.
Losing a hard drive is nasty, nasty, nasty. The Powerbook is my main work machine, plus I had some personal stuff on there. The personal stuff is all OK – I recently backed up to our home iMac G5. That’s also where we store our photos, music, etc.
But my work files are another story.
Toast, toast, toast
We haven’t had a good backup system in place for 3-4 years at the location I (until recently) spent most of my time at. I’ve been asking (3 times in the last 6 months) but wouldn’t you know it: just as I walk in with my busted drive, one of our tech guys is putting the finishing touches on a back-up server for that location.
Ouch.
What I really need, since I’m pretty mobile, is one of those one-touch portable disk backups – the kind that you just connect via Firewire or USB, press a button, and it clones your drive.
There are two sitting on a tech guy’s shelf right now in our Bellingham location, and I’m kicking myself for not taking one. He’s giving it to me now though. Probably mostly out of pity.
Off to Calee-forn-ee-a
Anyways, the drive is off to a data recovery place in California – they should be able to recover most if not all of my stuff.
We could grab a few things off it when we bootted my PB in Firewire disk mode. It was agonizingly slow, meaning there’s real trouble with the disk, but we could get some of my most critical business files.
I’ve got to wait a week at least, though, to know for sure.
Lessons learned, I guess.