The Apple "Genius" Bar

[jtidwell]

Long story short: my laptop's hard disk died last night. It was backed up not long ago, but there were some files I created in the last few days -- work I did for a client who's on deadline -- that I really needed to recover. I brought it to the Apple Store, and while I got the most important few files, they screwed up the rest of the drive

Comments

[perspicuity]

what model/generation of laptop? can't speak to the install, or what it did, but i hope to gods it wasn't a format, but a "overlay kinda restore"... your data MIGHT be there. one could extract the drive, and put it in a carrier, and see what you can see - possibly run some disk utils on it at your leisure ... (install a new drive too, install OS, restore some accounts...)

i've gotten pretty darn good at popping mine open. swapped a 100 GB toshiba i got from comp-useless into it, lovely drive: faster, quieter, less power, cooler, and oh yeah, bigger :>

a particular good tool i'd reccy in general, to make [bootable] image backups (for later) is "super duper"...

sorry if this is all already known stuff to you.

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the frequency increases

[wolftone]

You're the third person I know in as many months who has had a major mac data failure. I'm hoping that Time Machine in Leopard will solve this problem for all of us.

In the meantime, I recommend Mac Mozy. It's a free online backup service with limited space, but is a good way to preserve critical smaller files offsite. When I had my crash (yes, one of those 3 is me) it helped me get back on my feet with almost nothing lost.

Re: the frequency increases

[wolftone]

(forgot to mention....)

The extra URL characters in my link to Mozy are a referrer code. If you sign up using that link, you'll get some extra storage. (and so will I...)