the one that means he gets to give some guy in a clean room bunny suit $1800 again to poke through the photos he hadn't backed up.
When I was scheduling my trip to the Apple store to drop this thing off, the guy was all, "Have you considered upgrading to Leopard? It has a feature called Time Machine that automatically creates full mirrors of your drive."
And I was all, "Since this happened to me last year, I've been pretty good about backing up vital files, but yes, that sounds convenient, and I might consider buying your annual OS updates. Has Apple ever considered building a f(&$ing hard drive that lasts longer than a year? Because I have ten year old Thinkpads I can fire up any time I want."
So posting may be a little light today.
you already moved on to a new typewriter?
I've shared that special joy of handing over large amounts of cash because my HD on the family MacBook decided to hang itself from the rafters of our humble apartment
as a prudent purchaser of AppleCare, I have another two years of free replacement hard drives. At this rate, I'll have 2-3 more.
i lost a year of first kids photos to mac hard drive crashing madness. now we have time machine, it is backing up as we speak. haven't had to put it to the test yet, though.
We have 2 macbook laptops, replacing the 4-year old MacBook Pro laptops--- hard drives never failed on either one, they were just old and slow. BUT we did go for the TIme Capsule and Time Machine w/ Leopard. Which was awesome when my laptop had a hiccup and started acting funny. All I did was use the Time Machine to restore to a previous point- problem solved. No pictures, no music lost- no problem. Ta-da! Spring for Leopard, you'll be sorry if you don't.
Get Mozy. It's $5/mo and backs up everything securely online (or free for up to 2gb). It's arguably cheaper than Time Machine and it's not susceptible to theft or physical damage to your home (a fire or flood will wipe out both your 'book and your Time Machine).
Yeah, it's still a PITA to restore stuff when your HD conks out. But at least you won't lose any data. Plus it does 30 days of incremental backups, which can be handy even when your HD is working well.
Sign up through this link and I even get a little referral bonus.
Just had to chime in that I've been there, too. Ended up taking our HD to Kroll Ontrack, since they're in town and are apparently sort of known for data recovery. I never have told my wife exactly how much it cost - the cars in the parking lot should've been a tipoff, but I was still shocked at the bill. We had our wedding video footage as well as several years of digital photos on that drive, and only a small portion of it was backed up in any way. I've never regretted paying for the recovery though - my wife's father passed away suddenly just a couple months later. Of course, anytime the PowerBook's not in use these days, it's plugged into the spare drive with Time Machine running.
-g