Michael Henley

I have been thinking about how I should write this post for a few days now, and also been waiting for an (as yet unreplied to) support ticket to go through.

Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows that shortly after installing Windows 7 on my MacBook Pro I made a big mistake. After seeing that the Snow Leopard drivers allowed me to read and write to my internal HFS+ volume I plugged in my two WD MyBook Studio external drives to see if I could also read them. They didn’t mount so I popped into Disk Management and was asked what partition table they were using. ‘Simple’, I thought. They are GUID so I selected this and clicked ok. Then things went wrong. The drives came online but disk management showed them both as being unformatted. This was when I started to panic. Still hoping that this was Windows being silly I rebooted into OS X, only to be presented with two dialogs, one for each drive, saying that they were unrecognized and asking if I wanted to initialize, ignore, or eject. Now I start to panic. Disk Utility shows them as two partitionless drives.

Backups?

Ok, so I try to be pretty sensible about my backup policy. My MacBook Pro’s internal drive mirrors to a partition on one of the effected drive each night with SuperDuper!. Due to size issues however I keep my Aperture library on one of the external drives, with a vault on the other. My theory went that with this in place, and the most likely failures being a physical one on only one of the drives, my most important things kept on these would be safe. I admit that I never planned for both drives dying at the same time. Very very foolish on my part I know but I simply can’t afford to buy another set of 1TB and 500GB drives to image the external ones to. This seemed like the best solution.

Getting some data back:

I have to admit that I was pretty bummed out by the prospect of losing my largeish collection of photos from Aperture, many of which I haven’t put on Flickr for quite a while. There was also a collection of install images which generally come in quite useful along with some other bits and pieces. Basically I wanted/needed to get a lot of this back. Working on the principle that it was just the file tables which had been nuked I set to work trying out a couple of file recovery solutions. After scouring some blogs and support forums I found Boomerang Data Recovery Solutions. I ran the trial version of BoomDRS on the 500GB and was pretty damn happy to see it reporting the three partitions on the drive and detailing file sizes and names along with complete directory structure. I smiled for the first time in a few days. I knew that two of the partitions didn’t need recovering as one was an image of my internal drive which I could remake and the other was a copy of the OS X install DVD expanded to a partition which again I could remake.

Boomerang charge based on the amount you want to recover. This is where my problems with them began but I didn’t know it yet. I paid my £99 for a 1TB allowance (which I couldn’t really afford, but I digress…) and waited. Paying via paypal means you have to send your payment through a third-party called 2checkout. They take your money and then do fraud checks. After you have used paypal. This holds up the whole process for a day or so while they waste time. Once they finally release the order to Boomerang you get your activation code. I proceeded to begin the recovery to a third volume I labelled ‘Lifeboat’. My files began to reappear including the Aperture vault. To say I was happy would be an understatement.

After running for a few hours the folders I selected from the 500GB drive were all back. Boomerang were my new most favourite software company. Once I had repartitioned the 500GB drive and it was restored to its former glory I turned my attention to the 1TB drive. However every time I ran the scans from the Boomerang application on this drive it would crash. This happened regardless of the type of scan I tried to run. The support ticket I submitted including the crash report has not been responded to whilst they promise a response within 72 hours.

So I am sat here with ~850GB of unused recovery, a drive which I can’t use, and data still missing. Admittedly this data isn’t mission-critical. Mainly DVD ripped movies and TV shows along with the virtual hard drive for a Win 7 RC1 VirtualBox installation I had set up. I would rather not lose it but it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

So I am torn. I have the most important data back thanks to the boomerang software and for that I am really happy and wouldn’t mind recommending them, but they have treated me as a customer pretty badly. I have extra usage which I can’t use thanks to their application crashing and no response to my support enquiry. I think if as a company you are taking this much money off people then you owe them a degree of support especially if it is due to a consistent crash.

So what have I learnt from this experience?

Firstly I think this shows just how much we need a unified file system standard. MS, Apple, the open-source community along with other interested parties need to get together and sort this. Waging their war on consumers machines is not a good way to go. If I as a fairly savvy user can make this kind of mistake with relatively little effort then you can imagine how easy it would be for someone less knowledgeable. Secondly I need to have an even more robust backup solution. I thought what I had was pretty good but evidently not. I also need to be a lot more careful but I do have a habit of blindly running into these things believing I can fix it if I mess up. Thirdly I need to make sure I put even more effort into checking software recommendations. I would love to recommend Boomerang for the work their software did on my smaller drive but the whole experience is marred by buggy software and lacking support. There are other solutions such as Prosoft’s offering which is highly rated but I am reluctant to spend a further £50+ on the hope they are any better. Once bitten, twice shy I guess.

As an aside, I have written this whole thing on my iPhone over a coffee in Nero. I am still pretty impressed with how easy it is to type on this thing. Why it consistently thinks I am trying to type ‘Whig’ instead of ‘which’ I am not sure but on the whole it works well. Aside from slightly aching thumb joints this is easy. I might actually be touch-typing better on this than on a desktop.