So yeah, the whole “pull the hard drives out of the machine and drive them somewhere to have folks try to salvage the data from them” thing has definitely put a monkeywrench in my plans for this week.

It’s now unlikely I’ll get my new releases of Tasks Pro™ and Tasks out this week, among other problems.

Best Case

Thank goodness I was using offsite SVN for everything critical. My guess (hope) is that by the end of this I will have lost only:

• The convenience of already having my desktop machine configured as I like it.
• 2 days of work getting the drives out, back in and restored.
• $400-600 to get all my data back.

Here’s hoping.

Worst Case

I restore from my most recent full backup from the end of August and I lose any changes that weren’t being sync’ed to some central server. My source code, e-mail, calendaring, contacts and music¹ are all safe.

I’d likely lose some digital photos and some source documents (Photoshop and Illustrator files that were used to create various web graphics) and some changes to the King Design web site that I was working on and hadn’t checked in yet.

Lesson Learned

Either way, this has been a sharp wake-up call to get me properly paranoid about my backups again. When I get my drives back, I’ll be setting them up with both internal and external mirrors/backups.

When I first got my Quad, I had an automated backup system in place so I set my drives up as RAID 0 (striped) to get the best performance. After this, I’m changing my tune. I’ll either set them up as RAID 1 (mirrored) or as two independent volumes and use SuperDuper to do a scheduled incremental clone from one to the other.

Most likely, I’ll go the super paranoid route and do both RAID 1 and set up a SuperDuper job to run nightly to external backup drives.

1. Thanks to the new iTunes feature that allows purchased music to be transferred between computers via iPod. [back]

This post is part of the thread: Hard Drive Recovery – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.