When my hard drive bit the dust, my immediate worry for was my data. I knew how difficulty and expense of data recovery. With this in mind, I approached my Apple Genius Bar with little hope. After talking with Carl the Genius, I had two options: data recovery or complete hard drive replacement. I went with the latter.

After getting a spankin’ new hard drive, I went about the business of reconstructing my data. My first impression was how much of my data exists in the cloud. Through email attachments, web posts, Flickr accounts, Google Docs, and web servers I was able to download almost all the data for my current projects. I was also using CrashPlan and Mozy to various other archived files. The big chunk of data that were missing was iTunes Library. Senuti was essential for retrieving my iTunes Library from my iPhone and iPod.

I was lucky in the fact the much of data exists off my laptop. In the future I’ll be thinking of my hard drive as a rest stop for data instead of its final destination.