Bonus points for using the word 'crud'. - Akiva

ouch. - michael sean wright

Make them pay - Josh Haley

Funny that it took the Microsoft Research videos. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

i feel your pain... i'm screaming in sympathy - Nancy

I lost some email too. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

email is the worst of it.. been there done that.. - Nancy

careful what you say, Apple might block your itunes access. - Mike White

Were you using Time Machine? - Corbett Barr

No imap? :| - CantorJF

Luckily I backed up before our London trip so only lost a few things. Whew. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

I've had so many fujitsu hdd's develop the click of death over the years. They were in pretty much every IBM netvista machine the company I worked for bought during 2000 to 2004. Mind you, that was when they admitted to over 3 million HDDs witht he flaw - alphaxion

I lost all my London photos, too. Oh well. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Corbett: nope. I manually back up, though. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Steve Gibson said we could have the perfect hard drive to protect against stuff like this but it would cost $1000. Consumers want big drives, for low prices, and the denser the platters the more prone to failure. - Mark

Robert, you hit on one of the biggest consumer positives about Macs right there in that statement "off to the Apple store." - Thomas Hawk from iPhone

well when my pc breaks I go to PC World, so... - Mark

I won't put anything but a western digital drive in a laptop. I've had too many IBM, Hitachi, Fujitsu failures for it to be a coincidence. All the WD ones fail too, but they seem to do it slower giving me time to backup before they check out for good. - Steve Feinstein

You know those warranties you can get that give you a replacement if they cannot fix your laptop? What happens if you have a model that no longer exists? - Mark

One word.. JungleDisk... yes.. it takes a ton of time the first go round but it just works. I have a delta being sent up every 6 hours. Saved my bacon a couple times now. - Jerry Schuman

you backup every 6 hours? isn't that a bit on the silly side? - Mark

Jerry: yeah, I gotta use better backups. Sigh. Thomas I had to call four stores to get a genius bar appointment. Sigh. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Mark: that isn't silly. As I learned today. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Mark: Backing up is never a siilly thing to do. - Sean E Brown

Mark, in my experience Apple will replace it with the comparable current model if your model is no longer available. 6 hour backups isn't silly at all. Apple's Time Machine does hourly backups by default. Who am I to talk though, I just got a message that Time Machine hasn't backed up my Mac in 420 days.... - Mike Wheeler

Mark, I send delta changes... and honestly, no it's not silly, especially if your livelihood is dependent on it. I am constantly working and as a serial entrepreneur with a commercial application I cannot afford any type of data loss. - Jerry Schuman

If this was last week you would have fallen in love with this guy at Cambridge Laptop Repair: http://thebln.com/2009... - Mark Littlewood

I use Carbonite and signed my Dad up to the Mac version earlier this year. It seems to work well enough without havig to think about it. - Mark Littlewood

http://www.newegg.com/Product... - Karim

thanks for the reminder to turn the time machine back on - hope you get everything back. - WoH: Minding her Botts

Just another example of how all hardware fails, regardless of how well designed the housing is. - Scoble, Alex Scoble

@Thomas Hawk: Yes, you can go and see the Apple Store, where they will tell you they don't have replacement parts in stock, you'll have to wait a week. They get the part a week later, then tell you they won't fit it that day, you'll have to leave your laptop with them for another week. Compare with Dell: they send someone to you with the right parts to fit them on site. For warranty support, I've found my MBP to be an epic fail: getting the duff Superdrive fixed means being computerless for a week! - James

JungleDisk ftw... Always running in the background and automatically backing up my documents every 4 hours. Although it probably wouldn't have been able to save your gigantic photo/video files on the go :( - Holger Eilhard

James, or you can go to the apple store when sound isn't playing in one of your headphones and they can show you where they blew the lint out and send you on your way. - Thomas Hawk from iPhone

Robert, don't worry about the London Photos - TechCrunch already backed those up for you. - Jesse Stay

I'm certainly not a Dell fan but I have to agree on the on-location support. They sent someone out to both my home and office when I had something that needed to be fixed. One time they replaced a defective LCD... took about 15 minutes and I was back up and working again. - Dan McFarland

Now if only all those videos had been in the cloud! You'd have them all still! - Dane Deasy

Dane: I was uploading the last two when the drive died. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Ouch! Now that's just some bad luck! - Dane Deasy

I sure hope you had a full backup of your hard drive on an exteranl drive. - Jeff P. Henderson

(Side note: it's a very surreal experience for me - can't really explain it - to actually have you say my name and comment on my comment. It's sort of like, "OMG Robert Scoble really exists and he recognizes my existence as well!" Sort of a cheesy fan-moment I guess. Anyways, thanks for noticing my comment.) - Dane Deasy

Robert - sorry to hear of your pain.. ouch!! I love Jungle Disk Amazon S3 :) also have multiple Lacie NAS devices here ... really handy backups! - Susan Beebe

Kurt: I don't know. Apple installed it. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Apple Menu -> About this Mac -> More Info -> Serial-ATA -> Model - Sam Pullara

Sorry to hear that Scobes... mine died Tuesday, no power to the screen & then just not doing anything.. luckily its covered by applecare. I use Time Machine regularly, but with video files I rarely have a backup. Already use 2TB of external drives, and how can you back all that up on the road? Hope you recover the files, and pics. - ASKJDOG

arent the london pics still on some form of removable media? sd, cf ?? if so, dont they remain there until written over. even if they are deleted they might be recoverable until they actually written over by another file - Tobias Lewsadder