Cool Technology of the Week

My Cool Technology of the Week is Disk Rescue II and my cool staff at BIDMC (Alex Priest) and Harvard Medical School (Jason Obedzinski) who provided all the advice and effort that led to 100% recovery of the wife's data from her new MacBook Pro.

Here's what we did after the crash on Friday.

Alex and Jason suggested that we start with Disk Warrior.

On Monday and Tuesday we ran Disk Warrior and it enumerated a few thousand files by reconstructing metadata from the files on the damaged hard drive. However, the pace of recovery was such it would have taken several weeks to finish the enumeration.

On Wednesday we moved on to Disk Rescue II which enumerated the files by using the existing metadata on the drive rather than trying to reconstruct it from the files. My sense is that Disk Rescue is optimized for data recovery while Disk Warrior is optimized for disk repair/elimination of errors.

Within 24 hours Disk Rescue had enumerated 60 Gigabytes of files. Once this was done, copying them to an external drive took about an hour.

My wife reviewed the files and 100% of her powerpoint, documents, and photoshop archives were retrieved intact.

As an added bonus, 100% of her 5000 iTunes songs were also perfect.

I copied the data to our new Western Digital My Book Studio II 2 Terabyte home backup drive, configured with RAID 1 mirroring.

At 4pm today, I'll swap the defective Macbook Pro for a new one, reinstall Photoshop CS4, copy my wife's data from the backup drive, and run Time Machine to ensure a complete backup.

By tonight, domestic tranquility will be restored. That's cool!