This is what "saving old photos" looks like

Charlie and I have been tip-toeing around the apartment for the past two days so as to not disturb the disk recovery Gods from their work. This backup hard drive (one of two backups) has a bunch of picts that I might have saved somewhere else. Or, I might not have. Such is the fun of having too many megabytes and too few minutes.

Anyway, to stay on the safe side, I am trying to recover this baby rather than reformat. It was quite a surprise actually. One minute I was using it, browsing folders, etc. And then an application crashed. And then the disk was gone. Puf.

Probably better that I should stop schlepping hard drives around the globe and just upload these backups to Amazon A3 or a "Gmail drive" and let the pros keep the disks running.

Update: ok, that was going nowhere. After six days, I hit "cancel" and looked at alternatives. Also, I went from thinking "repair" to "salvage." This thing is hosed and I should just save what I can and get out with my life, the cat and the baby.

This new software "FileSalvage 6.1" is pretty intense. The instructions basically say "if you can plug it in to your computer, we can read the files off of it. 24 hours later, we are 1% of the way through the drive (thank God I never purchased one of those 500 MB or 1 TB drives!).
As for porogress, well, so far we know that 1.5 GB of disk has been scanned, revealing more than 190 bad blocks. Heh. For perspective, this guy, ran a "bad blocks" scan on his 160 GB drive and found... 3 bad blocks. Meaning, if I return to my "get out with my life, cat, baby" metaphor, this essentially means that the house burned to the ground with all of us inside and it just took me a while to notice.

I can stop now, nothing to see here, move along. Or is there. Cops figure out how bombs went off after the fact. Firemen figure out how fires started based on the remains. We just need to upgrade to the "forensic" version of the software, the same one they sell to the FBI and Homeland Security.

Update 2: Screw forensic. We're going straight to command line. Über geek John sent me this tip about how to use GNU DDrescue to recover data from a dead drive. I've read the first few lines of instructions. Opened the command line. And... well.. hm.. erm..