A reminder to back up your Mac's hard drive regularly.

[onehandle]

My wife's 2 year old iMac just made a loud grinding noise and the HD went bye-bye.

Luckily, she uses Time Machine with a Time Capsule. (and we have AppleCare to fix the drive)

Between us, we've had a lot of Macs. I have never had a drive go bad. She has had three drives go bad.

No comment.

[alfredo]

1. The drives usually go at a time that you haven't backed

up for a week or so.

[realisticphish]

2. i've lost 3 iMac hard drives

all within a year, on two different machines

[tomm2thumbs]

3. Thanks for the reminder - I finally did just that!

and for folks who want to know a pretty painless way of doing so, you can try SuperDuper! - which the guy who I bought my laptop from recommended. It's free and it basically creates a clone of your drive so you can always replace your drive if it should fail with everything the way it was, bootable and everything. Anyway, just in case it helps someone, here's a link to the program. http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html (They provide the back-up version of the program free in hopes that you purchase a version that does more specific things.)

Thanks again for the suggestion - always better safe than sorry!

[onehandle]

4. Yep. I'm a big supporter of the bootable backup. nt

[onehandle]

5. Follow up: We took her iMac to the Apple Store and they turned it around in three hours.

She restored from the Time Capsule last night. Went well, except she uses Microsoft Entourage and it lost all of its settings. It kept her addresses and all of her mail, but the individual configurations went back to default.

Could have been worse.

Back-up, and/or do the Time Machine thing.