Friday at work, I received a slightly panicked call from Anna: her 12″ PowerBook G4 had crashed. It had been acting slightly weird for some time (I thought it was just because she had a paltry 256MB of RAM) and had finally died. It wouldn’t boot at all, she said.
When I got home, I first tried accessing the hard drive via FireWire target mode, but that didn’t work. I then tried using Disk Utility from the laptop’s install CD, but Disk Utility couldn’t even find the drive. That’s not a good sign.
When the Apple Hardware Test application (on the install CD) found a major error with the hard drive, we decided to put our fate in the hands of an Mac Genius. As I write, they are running my copy of DataRescue in the hope of salvaging the contents of Anna’s home folder.
That home folder contains our Quicken file containing financial data dating back to 1998, the only copy of the photos from our honeymoon in the Cotswolds, many years worth of archived email, and all of Anna’s writing. You can, no doubt, understand why we’re keen on seeing it restored.
I just downloaded a copy of Synk last night and will help Anna develop a comprehensive backup plan to (hopefully) avoid something like this in the future.