Jason Baldwin (.us)

Up until last evening around 7, my MacBook Pro was fine. Then it started hang­ing while access­ing files, and I heard the begin­nings of the dreaded Hard Drive Click. Having been some­what smart, I’d been using Time Machine for backup a few months ago, so I didn’t think it’d be much of an issue to recover.

Until I found that my last full backup on the Time Machine drive was from February 12.

I found the orig­i­nal drive that I’d replaced with the now-failing one, and 20 min­utes later (a new per­sonal record for replac­ing a lap­top hard drive), I had a bare drive I need to recover. I couldn’t find my SATA-to-USB dock, so I ripped open an old Western Digital exter­nal 2.5″ drive enclo­sure, and after restor­ing the last Time Machine backup to the good drive (5 hours later, but I’m not com­plain­ing), I hooked up the fail­ing drive to see what was recoverable.

I tried Disk Utility. No dice.

I tried DiskWarrior. Again, no luck.

I remem­bered tales of putting a fail­ing drive in the freezer to sal­vage it, so I tried that today. Five hours in the freezer while I drove to Fry’s to pro­cure a new hard drive, and DataRescue II was able to read the whole disk, but the drive warmed up too quickly to do a com­plete recov­ery (yet). So I’m going to go buy some cans of com­pressed air and drip the coolant on the drive as it tries to do the recovery.

I don’t think I lost much; all my media resides on exter­nal dri­ves, my mail lives on the server, my book­marks are on Delicious, and I was already able to copy my iTunes library files to a safe place. Still, there are some things I won’t be able to replace, and it’s frustrating.

My biggest con­cern right now is track­ing down all the installers for the apps I have, and all the ser­ial num­bers, license files and other reg­is­tra­tion infor­ma­tion. That’ll be the hard part if I have to rebuild. Oh, and the five or six years of e-mail archives I hadn’t got­ten around to upload­ing to the server yet. I hope that’s recoverable.

Oh, well. It could have been worse. It could have caught fire.

The moral of this story? BACK YOUR SHIT UP.

Update: Dammitalltohell, I’m going to have to set up my web devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment again. CRAP. That was a night­mare the first time, and it’ll be a night­mare again, I’m sure.