PSA: Backup your stuff.
Last night Melody’s laptop hard drive decided to die a horrible, click-filled death. As it became apparent things were going downhill suddenly, we acted fast and managed to pull off a handful of files before it failed completely. Unfortunately by handful I mean like maybe 200MB of stuff which did NOT include bookmarks, sticky notes, years of emails, photos, and tons of other stuff that wasn’t backed up.
What really sucks is that I had been playing with Leopard using the partition I had used to back up her laptop in the past and was going to re-backup her computer and trash the Leopard beta just last night before we went to bed - about an hour before the drive suddenly died. So, basically, I could have prevented or at least minimized the whole thing if I hadn’t decided it would be fun to mess with Leopard briefly. Wonderful. The only thing that makes me feel slightly better about that situation was that the backup I had overwritten was really really old. At least several months - if not longer. Of course it would have been better than nothing and a lot of the older stuff is the stuff she really would liked to have kept anyway. *sigh*
So today I’ve managed to recover all the music that was on her iPod using a nice tool called Senuti - but so far I haven’t got her photos from it and I’m not sure it’s worth it. iTunes resizes the photos for the iPod anyway and so they’d be tiny thumbnails in the end. *sigh*
Later today I’ll call Apple and hope that buying Apple Care pays off in the form of a new hard drive, at least…
Ironically, we have been preparing for the release of Leopard and Time Machine by buying a new Airport that supports attaching a hard drive and planning to buy a RAID array to attach to the airport so that we could set up Time Machine on each of our laptops to use that drive as a backup volume so we’d have automatic and safe backups… *sigh*