If your hard drive crashed tomorrow, your house burned down, or someone stole your computer, what would happen to your photos, documents, and other digital data? Having had my own brush with this recently, I took a fresh look at my own safeguards and the steps you can take to protect your own data in different scenarios.
I came home to a crashed MacBook Monday and rebooted to ominous clicking sounds and a flashing question mark - smelled like hard drive trouble. A bit of troubleshooting and a quick visit to the Apple store later, and I was shopping for a new hard drive and crossing my fingers that Time Machine saved my data and unpublished photos from Colorado.
The hard drive was a total loss; neither I or Apple could see it when booting from another location, and the clicks hinted that something mechanical broke after two years. Apple did well on several counts: their troubleshooting article was easy to find and follow, I was able to get the last tech support slot the same evening, and the guy at the Genius Bar was honest enough to tell me that for the $250 they’d charge to replace the 80GB drive, I could pay half and install a bigger one myself.
They missed on one small thing, and one very big one: their reservation form still doesn’t work in Firefox, and there’s a nasty, unadvertised limitation on Aperture and Time Machine that meant many of my recent photos were lost!
