Last April, the hard drive in my computer died, taking all of my photos and music with it. I quickly purchased a new hard drive, and let the old one sit until I could make an attempt at getting into it (a project that, unfortunately, was going to require more than the standard suite of disk recovery tools included with the computer).
With some extra money I earned over Christmas season (hooray for the pseudo-commission pay structure I have at work), I was able to pick up Disk Warrior 4 and throw it at the drive. It had to run overnight, and wasn’t able to repair the issues, but it was able to temporarily mount the drive and allow access to most (though not all) of the filesystem. I wasn’t able to get more ‘official’ stuff, like my schoolwork for earlier quarters or old mail or contact lists (basically, some of the ~/Documents folder and all of the ~/Library folder were just gone)…but I was able to bring back all of my photos and music.
So, after about a week and a half of working during any spare time I could find, all my photos are backed up on DVD, and all my music is back on my computer and at my fingertips. 17,978 individual tracks that take up 81.43 Gb of space and would require 92 days, one hour, twenty-two minutes and twenty-eight seconds to listen to straight through from beginning to end.
It’s so nice to have it all back.
H’mmm, must do those backup CD’s…
Thanks for the reminder!
My PowerBook’s hard drive died yesterday and will probably be replaced with a new drive. I have copies of all my photos and music but not a current version of either library. It is going to be a real pain reconstructing all my metadata unless there is a way to get all that done by transferring the data from my iPod to iTunes?
I’m working on figuring out The Right Way to store/organize stuff long-term, too.
My friend Adam (a geek friend I respect highly) really recommends Unison as a way to keep various sets of files synchronized. He posted about keeping all sorts of things synced here.
It may take a moment to load … it’s in New Zealand. :)
R
Bummer, but at least you got all (most?) of what you wanted back. DiskWarrior rocks, but I’m always amazed to see that people don’t back up their stuff. Personally, I don’t like to back up to CD or DVDs: not enough capacity, and I worry about shelf life. Large and very large external hard drives are affordable these days, and backing up to them is fast and requires no user intervention. I currently use Retrospect, but I’m looking forward to Time Machine that Apple will release with Leopard.
Message to Paul (if it’s not too late): there are many applications that will transfer iPod data to a computer. I won’t make a recommendation, but Google is your friend.
Finally, since most of the people who reply to articles appear to be friends and/or family members, you probably wonder who the hell I am. No, you don’t know me, but I found your site a long time ago (if memory serves because of the Microsoft episode) and I bookmarked it since it looked intresting to me. I won’t tell you that I’m visiting often, but the bookmark is there, and every once in a while I stop by to see what’s cooking. I admire anyone who can update a web site as often as you manage to. Also, I like your photos, the way you write, and the name “Prairie”. :-)
Keep up the good work!
Daniel
Valbonne, France
PS Never been to Alaska, always wanted to go. One of these years…