The Home CIO Gets in Trouble

For Christmas, I gave my wife a Macbook Pro 15" with 4 gigabytes of RAM and 320 gigs of storage, running Adobe Creative Suite 4. A great machine.

Whenever I get a new device for the family, I apply all updates, install printer drivers, and move all data from the old machine to the new machine.

In this case, I moved 60 gigabytes from my wife's old machine to this new machine - all her documents, all her powerpoints, all her photoshop work, and all her 5000 song iTunes library. I migrated her digital life.

My daughter has an iMac 20" with 320 gigabytes of storage and I have a Macbook Air with 80 gigabytes. We use Time Machine and an external USB hard drive for backup, but it's only a 280 gigabyte drive, without enough room to backup my wife's system. I planned to buy a Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II 2 Terabyte Dual-Drive Storage System (900 Gigabytes usable with RAID 1) this week to support all our backup needs. In the meantime, I was confident that the new Macbook Pro would keep my wife's data safe.

Remember that Risk = likelihood of bad events * consequence of bad events.

The likelihood of a new Macbook Pro having a catastrophic hard drive failure is near zero.

Last Friday morning, my wife opened the lid of her Macbook and a Flashing Question Mark appeared instead of the usual OS X screen. The consequence of this bad event is that my wife lost her entire digital existence and had no backup.

I desperately tried everything suggested by Apple - booting from the DVD, doing a disk repair with the Disk utility, reseting Parameter RAM, reinstalling OS X etc. but the hard disk could not be mounted.

I consulted with my best Mac engineers at BIDMC and Harvard.

They recommended Disk Warrior. It's been running all weekend without success.

Our next step is Data Rescue II

If that fails, then Drive Savers will rebuild the drive by inserting the platters into a new drive.

The good folks at Apple have been very supportive and have offered to replace my Mac book at no charge.

Along the way, I've learned many important lessons

1. All hard drives can fail. Back them up.
2. Hard drives fail most often when they're very new or very old. A failure within the first week of operation is not uncommon.
3. If you need to copy your iTunes library back from your iPod to iTunes, it is possible despite the digital rights management design which attempts to make this difficult. Here are the simple instructions to do this.

This week I'll get my wife a new Macbook, get a backup drive with built in RAID 1 protection, restore her iTunes from her iPod and hopefully recover her documents/powerpoints/photoshop work.

Even the home CIO is held accountable!