Anyhow, Happy New Year!

Thanks also for your sympathy and advice (your long comment was languishing in limbo until today when I saw it waiting to be “approved”). You’re not the only one to suggest online backup, although what’s always held me back from taking that route (for more than a handful of documents, anyway) is that it’s so much *slower* than a firewire connection to another drive. Perhaps your broadband is faster than mine… I only get 3 Mbps downstream, and about 1Mbps upstream. (Remember when speeds like that sounded fast?) I’ll look into it, nevertheless. (As for tape, as you note, cost is kinda prohibitive.)

Even if I were to do incremental backup of key documents to the “cloud,” though, I’d probably still want an emergency bootable copy on a physical drive… and the attempt to create that is exactly what killed me here. That’s what’s so frustrating. Everything I’ve ever read says best practice is to do one *whole* backup before doing later incremental ones, and that was the stumbling block. *Whatever* form of external storage I might’ve been trying to write to, it was the very process of writing from my whole chock-fulla-documents User Folder at one time that apparently proved to be too much for my drive heads.

Last conversation from the data recovery guy, he informed me that my PowerBook had a particular model of Seagate drive with a known flaw that can lead to physical drive failure… meaning my odds of recovery are down around 40%, and if anything’s there it’ll be expensive. At this point I’m pondering the cost (in terms of both emotional angst and sheer inconvenience) of just writing off the lost data and restarting from scratch. New year, fresh start, right?…

I’m very much not a fan of backing up hard drive to hard drive because drives die a lot. I prefer tape, but doing that is a pretty big investment in time and trouble.

Happily, these days there’s something a lot easier to do if you have broadband. There are a number of good online backup services available these days, which let you set up backups that you can just set up to go and forget about. I’ve been using a service called SugarSync. http://www.sugarsync.com/ Which you can try for free. There are plenty of other services around too.

http://www.macworld.com/article/142606/2009/09/online_backup.html
http://www.nextadvisor.com/online_backup_services/compare_mac.php

Those can get you started.

I don’t have SugarSync back everything up for me, just my project folders as I create them and also things like my email files and photos. I haven’t had to use it yet, but it’s nice to have around. It’s also been handy for me as I can set a backup to become a shared web folder, so I’ve been able to use it to get docs to people with ridiculous limits on email attachments.

Oh, and no matter how you decide to approach backups, you absolutely must do a test restore once you’ve got a backup up and running. It won’t do you any good to be backing up if the backups are buggered.

For a bootable external drive, a clean install of the OS is the best way to go, along with a fresh install of third-party apps, preference panes, etc.

In retrospect, yeah, that would’ve been the way to go. (Although a lot more labor-intensive.) Suffice it to say I’m a whole lot more skeptical now about the usefulness of programs like SuperDuper (and its competitor CarbonCopyCloner), notwithstanding all the glowing reviews scattered about.

Of course, given that the failure occurred right at the point when it was trying to copy my User folder, which is easily half of my content overall, it might have happened even had I just done it manually.

OTOH, as long as I’m casting recriminations at myself (and believe me, I’ve been doing that all day), if I’d just gotten off the fence and done this months ago, maybe the drive would’ve survived the ordeal and I’d have a recoverable backup. I kept procrastinating because I was (until recently) always using the computer for one big project or another, and didn’t want to be left hanging if I started fiddling with it and Something Happened. (Like this.) So, IOW, trying to be risk-averse wound up leaving me in a risky situation. Can’t win for losing, eh?

(Do people really still scatter their files hither and yon like that? The OS practically holds your hand to avoid it these days…)

Michael-
You must have quite a few backup CDs floating around at this point. Doesn’t organizing/cataloging them get to be a hassle?

Anyhow, thanks for the good wishes, everyone. Keeping my fingers crossed…

Anyway, I’m wishing you the best and hope all that data can be restored!

*winces*