[iCarllovesapple]

Boo! The weather in Perth is extremely Crazzzzzzy! Wind, Rain, Hail.
Anyway last night the wind was especially bad!
Today after school I was asked to help cater for a charity function my school was holding. The Weather was very bad at this point.
I get home (10pm) and I go to my Macbook Pro. I left it on, along with my Seagate HD, as mozy.com was backing up the drive! So I went to open my iTunes when I was greeted with the 'Cannot find your iTunes library window' I thought that was strange, so I tried manually looking for it. It wasn't there. I looked in Finder it wasn't there either. I finally turned it off and on (The external HD) and found a weird file called 'Recovery'. I clicked on it, and found everything. Accept.. It was in 4KB file size. I was devastated. But.. I was also somewhat relieved. Mozy had backed up my files! So I am waiting for the restore process to start which should take 1 or 2 days. I hope the weather clears up so I can get all of my files back in some systematic order.
I am really upset though. I am going to start keeping 'Hard Copy' backups as well. I'll buy a cheap WD external drive and backup backup backup...
Please, share your computer HD horror stories..

[Beau]

Time Machine.

Hard drive broke. AppleCare replaced it. Restored stuff from Time Machine. Happy Ending.

[Darwiniandude]

I LOVE time machine, it works very nicely. I've popped a 500GB into my Macbook, and having 400 or so used, I'm glad to know it's backed up.

[tcn33]

Lost a 500GB drive with all of my photos on it - no backup. Lucky I had them synced to my AppleTV...

Now I backup everything via Time Machine and have offsite/cloud backups of my photos just in case.

[ClockWork]

Back in 1998, I worked in an all Mac Graphic Design / Print studio, creating complex 300dpi poster sized Photoshop renderings, which took aaaages on the older Motorola Processors.

One night, the HDD which kept all our artwork started clicking. My boss was outa town and he'd put this total bitch in charge.

She was a total bitch because she detested me and was always rude and undermining, in an effort to assert herself.

I started noticing files disappearing. It was like watching bad sectors appearing, one after the other, so I called up a mate with a big external drive @ 3:00am and he came down and we began backing the HDD to his chunky External Drive, but this was extremely time consuming.

The "bitch" arrived 3 and half hours later to find me and this guy she'd never seen before, with the central machine open, it's guts hanging out and a big fat IDE cable stretched across the desk to his external.

She blew her effing top - as in: WTF are you doing? Who's he? Why's the central Mac got its guts hanging out? I'm in charge here, not you! You're doing what!? That's intellectual property! etc etc

We both tried explaining that its HDD was dying and we were trying to backup its content before every sector failed... but she wouldn't buy that, so she called the police, had us disconnect the cables and put everything back together - before firing me and kicking the pair of us out.

After the boss got back, heard the story and had a chat to me about what had happened, I was unfired... but - we lost $500,000 of irreplacable digital artwork.

Moral: Have several back up drives - just to be on the safer side, and avoid bleach blonde bitches with severe menopause.

[The_Hawk]

I haven't lost anything yet, but I have heard some horror stories...

Like the guy who comes home with his brand new external drive to "backup" all his documents, photos etc... so he backs it up... then delete's it from his main computer as he needs the space. Flash forward 24 hours and due to Murphy's Law, the external drive refuses to power up. Seems it has died... The dude says "but I backed up"...

Moral of the story:
back⋅up [bak-uhp]
–noun
In reference to computers:
a. a copy or duplicate version, esp. of a file, program, or entire computer system, retained for use in the event that the original is in some way rendered unusable.

if it's the ONLY copy it's not a backup.

All my photo's and video documents are automatically incrementally backed up to a seperate physical HDD, they are also uploaded to a hosting service I pay for (100GB+ and counting so far) and about once every few months I do a full DVD set for good measure and send it to mums house.

[snowleopard48]

I was upgrading to leopard from tiger on my iMac G5 (don't have it anymore) and once the install had finished, i had no menu bar, all i had was the dock, my desktop picture and a beach-ball... don't know what happened... so i ended up doing a reinstall. still nothing. i firewired the machine to my new 24" Aluminium iMac, and got all the files. then did a erase & install on the G5. all was good. is this a HD crash???

[andytlr]

Originally Posted by ClockWork

After the boss got back, heard the story and had a chat to me about what had happened, I was unfired... but - we lost $500,000 of irreplacable digital artwork.

What did the bitch say when you were rehired?

At work we had a hard drive die with some really important stuff on it. We found this person who buys an identical drive for parts and replaces bits one by one to get it working. Trying to find an identical four year old hard drive was incredibly hard and she charges an absolute fortune. The price of 1TB externals now is so cheap it just isn't worth not having a backup of everything.

I have a time machine drive but I also have all my music on my iPod and all my photos on Flickr. Three places is better than two.

[ClockWork]

Originally Posted by snowleopard48

is this a HD crash???

You should know.
You work for Apple... remember?

=P

Originally Posted by andytlr

What did the bitch say when you were rehired?

Bitches don't talk much after events like that...

[tintinaujapon]

Having cost half a mill of lost work, I'm surprised she wasn't fired and you weren't given the opportunity to convey the message.

[grfxninja]

Originally Posted by ClockWork

…

Clockwork, please, I implore you write a book of your anecdotes.

I swear you have some of the best stories going around

I'm still chuckling about the ugly dude who thought someone had hacked his video cam on skype

[LCGuy]

Originally Posted by The_Hawk

I haven't lost anything yet, but I have heard some horror stories...

Like the guy who comes home with his brand new external drive to "backup" all his documents, photos etc... so he backs it up... then delete's it from his main computer as he needs the space. Flash forward 24 hours and due to Murphy's Law, the external drive refuses to power up. Seems it has died... The dude says "but I backed up"...

I'm not at all surprised...when I was running my computer repair business, I had one customer who had partitioned his single 80GB HDD into two 40GB partitions, and his "backup strategy" for the past four years had been to set Norton to "back up" from one partition to the other! Needless to say...I told him about the big problem with what he was doing, and that all the "backing up" he'd done for the last 4 years had been for nothing....thankfully, about a week later he went out and bought an external hard drive, and got me to set it up for him.

As for me, I've had a couple of head crashes...and lost a bit of data from them too, mostly on older drives...needless to say, i'm now paranoid about backing up.

[samwalk]

My Server at work had a single Hard drive in it with 2 partitions. The first partition for the OS and OS X Server, the second for data. We had run out of space on the data partition so we decided to move the data to a second hard drive, reformat the first drive with a single partition and image the OS and Server software back. At the same time we purchased a new 1 terabyte external drive for backup purposes. The tech employed to do the work imaged my drive to the external drive, checked that the image worked, reformatted my internal drive and tried to restore the image only to find that the new external drive had failed. We lost everything! Not only that but the tech had to setup OS X Server from scratch. What was meant to be a one day job turned into a three day job.