“Every hard drive will fail at some point in its life” 
11
I have had two hard drives connected to my iMac — an 80Gb internal and a 250Gb external (via FireWire) — and yesterday my internal one died - one minute it was working fine, then it started making a noise and then about 30 seconds later it died.
Fortunately I was able to simply install Mac OS X onto my external drive and carry on. My automated weekly backup had run successfully the day before so I’d only lost one day’s worth of “work” but unfortunately I’d spent most of yesterday picking new colours for this site’s planned seasonal colour changes - not a big job but I’m crap at colour coordination and it’d taken a lot of effort to get it right. And, of course, I’ve got to reinstall all my programs and get everything set up the way I like it.
One ray of sunshine was the fact that I have a .Mac account and have it set to keep my address book, calendars, email and website bookmarks in sync so I can access them from any PC or Mac connected to the internet - this also means that to restore them all after reinstalling my machine is easy: they’re just copied back from my .Mac account onto my iMac. One more reason to be glad that I stumped up the £60 to renew my subscription.
I’ve ordered a shiny new 250Gb drive (which Tugger is going to fit for me on Wednesday) to replace the fried internal one and an equally shiny 500Gb external one to add extra backup space - I didn’t have enough room to backup everything that I wanted and so I’m taking no chances from now on.
I use SuperDuper! to make a bootable backup of my whole HD, System, users, applications and all, so if my HD ever fails, all i have to do is boot up from the external drive, and it’s exactly the way it was. - LobsterMan
I think I’m going to use my current 250Gb external as a mirror for my new 250Gb internal (i.e. RAID 1) and the 500Gb external for stuff I can easily replace, i.e. encoded DVDs and CDs. - Timmargh
I was going to suggest exactly the same thing… - tugger
“Great minds think alike.”
… or …
“Fools seldom differ.”
;^) - Timmargh
I really should back up my pcs at some point..
If I say this though, something is bound to go wrong soon
So maybe I should do it -really- soon
It’s only pictures I want to save anyway - Grix
I just wanted to let you in on something you can do to attempt at retrieving some of the lost data off your drive. It may sound crazy, but it’s worked for me in the past, nad I know how aggravating lost data can be. Freeze the crashed drive in your freezer for 2 days, then connect it to an external USB or Firewire connection as well as power and if things go well it should spin up and be readable for a half hour or so; usually enough to copy your most important files! Once it goes cookoo again, repeat process until you got everything back. Then contact drive manufacturer and send the drive in and if it’s under warranty they will send you a replacement for free; all you pay for is the shipping of the drive to them. - kaotica
I have a mac. If I didn’t spend all my money on pimp hats it’d be a lot faster too, because I’d probably understand this sort of thing. - Agent Fang
I’m interested in this ‘save old crashed hard drive data’ thing as I have one too. I was being laughed at for keeping it, but I said it was a mixture of eternal hope and lack of trust (not wanting ‘totalled’ hard drive to fall into the hands of someone who knew how to access the information). Hmm, hmm. - Diddums
Good look with the recovery. - Timmargh
Handy having that external drive, I have 4 of varying sizes hooked up in my PC and backup the important stuff on moere than one if I feel the need too. But you nice new 500gig drive totals my 4 drives nearly - I’m jealous :) - Alex
Come on now Tim, update update - Grix
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