I just spent the better part of the night trying to get data back from a friend’s MacBook that had a failed hard drive. Those of you that have had this happen while running Apple’s OS X may know the sickening feeling you get when all you see when you start up is an icon of a folder with a flashing question mark. Sometimes you can get lucky by resetting PRAM and telling the system what disk to boot from, but this was not the case with this MacBook. It was painful and took forever to get any data back at all.

Fortunately I had my MacBook Pro with me to help get through this. I had DiskWarrior on my MBP and figured I would just start up the MacBook in firewire target mode and let DiskWarrior have a look. (You do vacation with a 6 pin to 6 pin firewire cable, don’t you? Yeah, me neither, but I was lucky enough to find one at a Best Buy in Myrtle Beach since everything else had just closed. Unfortunately I paid a premium for that cable from Best Buy, as you do with all cables you buy there, but I was in no position to complain and they were my last option for the night.)

Well, the MacBook had different ideas about how this was going to work and I could not see the hard drive regardless of what I did; hold down the Option key. Nothing. Hold down Shift. Nothing. Hold down Command-S. Nothing. Command-V. Nothing. Hold down C to boot from a Tiger install DVD I had in my bag. Nothing. Hold down T for firewire target mode. Nothing!

As a last ditch effort I decided to make sure I was doing things correctly and tried to put my MBP in target mode and bring up the MacBook using my MBP’s hard drive. It actually worked. I still could not see the local drive on the MacBook, but I was able to run DiskWarrior against the MacBook and it did find the hard drive and did it’s best to repair. But it couldn’t. It was pretty much beyond repair and DiskWarrior gave me one last chance to pull off all the data I could in preview mode, so I copied as much of her data as I could to my MBP hard drive and every USB key I could find. That got us most of the way there. Now she can deal with Apple since it is under Apple Care and they can replace the hard drive.  In the end I was able to salvage their pictures, documents, settings, and music.

So here is my simple recommendations for protecting your data relatively inexpensive while still getting backups done in a decent amount of time:

• For email, either use a web browser to access your email at your ISP (or GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc.) or configure your mail client for IMAP so you always have a copy of your email at your mail provider. If you must do POP/POP3 configure the client to leave a copy of the messages on the server. This way you will not have to deal with email recovery in the event of a disaster.  If your ISP purges email from its servers every X amount of days – find another email provider.
• Do yourself a favor so you never have to go through the recovery process I just went through – go buy an external USB drive and use it for backups. The performance will be fine and if you are running OS X Leopard it will immediately recognize the disk and ask you if you want to use it for Time Machine backups. Answer yes and move on with your life. I probably spent close to 12 hours trying to save the data because I knew very few others would even try to save her data at all. The drives work just as well with Windows. I probably wouldn’t waste my time with the backup software that comes with the drives, as the operating system will have something you can use that it probably better.

There are other backup utilities out there. Do some light reading on Google and see which one makes the most sense for you. It doesn’t matter to me if you are using 10,000 floppy disks, USB keys, USB hard drives, copying to other computers somewhere in your home, backing up to one of the hosted backup solutions, or using .Mac – just do something! As we put more and more data on our computers the problem just gets worse and worse.

Best Buy has the Western Digital My Book Essential 500GB External Hard Drive on sale for $99 right now. It has USB connectivity and should work very well for backups. I may buy 2. The price goes up if you need Firewire connectivity or more storage, but this looks like a decent size and fit for me. The first thing I’m going to do when I get home is to check our backups. It’s such an easy thing to do and none of of do it like we should. None of us. It is not a matter of if a drive is going to fail, it is a matter of when. Good backups will lessen the pain when you have to rebuild that computer, or reload the hard drive from scratch.