Well, I didn’t end up losing much data at all. Only my iTunes Library file was corrupted beyond repair, and iPodRip is rebuilding that from the contents of my iPod as I type this.

I ended up getting a new 100GB Seagate drive from CompUSA on Friday night. Their service plan would have covered a new 80GB drive (and installation), but they wanted to take my precious away from me for 1-2 weeks. That was unacceptable, since I need my laptop for work, so I paid for a new drive outright, and somehow they waived most of the installation fee for me, since I insisted they didn’t need to do any data transfer or OS installation. I got the Powerbook back on Saturday.

So Saturday night was spent copying all of my files back over from my surrogate drive, making sure obscure preference files were back in their proper locations, and reinstalling a few of my favorite utilites: Butler, DesktopSweeper, BluePhoneElite, and MenuMeters. I also decided to get used to iScroll2 instead of SideTrack, since all good little Powerbooks use the new two-finger-scrolling method instead of the Windows-laptop-like side-scrolling areas. So far it works pretty nicely.

As far as an automatic backup script (as suggested by Doug), I’m undecided as to what to use. I’ve used SuperDuper! before, but scheduling won’t be supported until the next version. Do I dare wait for it? Except for that omission, it seems like the perfect solution to my problem.

Another problem is that I was planning to use my new 160GB drive to mirror both Powerbook’s drives - both mine and Jennifer’s. Now I have a bigger drive, and 80GB + 100GB > 160GB. Whatever shall I do? I need to swap some drives around … I have a 250GB Lacie drive formatted as NTFS that I could use as the backup drive. It might work.

All in all, an ultimately pretty painless disaster has been shrugged off. Except for the cash outlay. That I could have done without.