Thank You
 

I'm involved with a major programming/development project, with a deadline in a couple weeks. This 3-day weekend was critically important to me, since I don't have a lot of time to work on this project on the weekdays.

So it was very frustrating when my Powerbook started getting slower and slower, freezing and hanging. And then it happened. Total drive failure. When I boot off my backup, Disk Utility says "SMART failure" in big red letters.

When I relate that to the Apple Genius, he doesn't even bother trying to resurrect the drive. "It's toast," he says. "Do you have a backup?"

Why, yes. Yes I do.

Coincidentally I had just done a complete backup in preparation for the 10.4.5 update, which I wanted to test in a Sandbox.

The Genius seems to swoon a little. "It warms my heart to hear you say that," he says. "I hardly ever hear someone say they have a recent backup." He checks his computer. "We have the parts in stock," he tells me. "If you don't need the OS reinstalled, we can turn it around real quick."

So, while I eat lunch, the Apple Geniuses replace my hard drive. An hour after that I've restored all my files. Total down time: about 3 hours, including lunch.

And everything is back the way it was. I think maybe my new hard drive is a little faster than the one I had before.

Thank you, Dave. Thank you so much!

Hey, great to hear, Khuzud -- this kind of thing does happen far, far too often, and it's great to hear from people who are using SuperDuper! to mitigate the effects of a disk failure.

You might find another small application, SMARTReporter, useful. It'll give a more visible indication that things are going wrong with the drive, and that additional time might help you, or others, prepare for the failure.

Thanks again for the note!