A word of caution to those of you moving around with small portable hard drives: they are extremely fragile and you could lose all of your data….easily. In addition, some of these drives are more fragile than others since their manufacturers have taken shortcuts to make them smaller than competitors portable drives.

My wife carried around a portable, 1 terabyte hard drive. On it were redundant, backed up files (480GB worth and about 478GB she already has on another drive) but also contained a directory of images she’d taken at a European trade show. In its soft case, it slipped from her grasp about two feet from the floor and subsequently wouldn’t mount on her computer desktop.

Fearing the worse, I began diagnostics on it and was able to see it as attached storage and determine that the read/write head wasn’t doing any damage to the disks themselves. None of my recovery programs would work though—and professional data recovery starts at $695 and can run to $1,995 (from Kroll OnTrack 5 minutes from our offices)—so I tried other recovery attempts.

This portable hard drive is the Western Digital (WD) 1TB My Passport, now available at Costco for $129. Apparently to make their portable hard drives smaller than the competition, WD took a shortcut and has taken to soldering the USB connector directly to the controller board on the drive. What this means is that I couldn’t do what I’ve done in the past with other portable drives: pop open the case, take the drive out, and plug it in to my desktop tower (or even to an external case) and bypass what is likely a broken USB connection.

My only other options were to spend what would likely be ~$1,000 to recover my wife’s photos or to try just one more recovery method.

Since I had a desktop external 1TB hard drive I could use to recover the files using DDRescue, I started that block-by-block copying process the next morning (Friday). That afternoon I talked to a buddy of mine who runs service for a large retailer and mentioned I was three hours in to the process. He asked me to place my hand on the external hard drive to which the data was being copied. “Damn!“, I exclaimed, “It is very hot!” His response to me was, “At the rate of recovery and the amount of data on your disk, it will take 10 days to recover but you’ll burn up your hard drive before the weekend is out.“

Besides the knowledge they have of recovery, it turns out the pros have very expensive recovery drives that are cooled and run thousands apiece. “Don’t be a tightwad. Spend the money Borsch” was his parting advice.

That’s my cautionary tale to you today if you’re considering owning one of these portable drives (or already do). Even if you’re rigorous about backing up, if you’re enroute to the place where you do backup and drop this drive before you have a chance to do so (especially one of these WD drives) you can kiss your data or many hundreds of dollars goodbye.

While on the hunt for something completely different I came across this video on YouTube and offer it up as a public service. Just in case you are befuddled by that new dial on your telephone:

We can laugh about this all we want now, but I remember my grandparents talking about having party lines out in North and South Dakota and what a big deal it was when the rotary dial came in to being and they had an actual phone number they could give out to people, “Hey! You can now ‘direct dial’ me?“

I’ve got a pretty sad 15 year old son who is using his own money to buy an iPhone 4. Unfortunately, there’s no iPhone 4 for him and here’s why…

When pre-ordering/reservation time came for the iPhone 4, I happened to be at the Mall of America (MOA) Apple store. After an hour of attempting to consummate my order, I gave up thinking I’d try again later that afternoon when I had to return to MOA.

My daughter snagged one as did I that day. My wife was traveling and I ended up ordering one online for her a few days later. When iPhone launch day came I was able to get my pre-order and buy a second phone activated for my wife. Thinking I still had one on order for her—and we’d get that one and activate it for my son—I was dumbfounded to get an email forward from my wife today within which Apple stated there was a problem and they couldn’t ship and to call AT&T.

AT&T was clueless on how to help since the phone number attached to the incoming iPhone was the same as my wife’s…and you know Apple is trying to restrict the gray market or people buying multiple phones and that’s why it was cancelled.

Being reasonable, an Apple fanboy, someone who owns far too many Apple products and once worked for the company, I figured it would be trivial to change the phone number on the order and have that device be “attached” to my son’s phone number.

Not a snowball’s chance in Hades my friend.

After half an hour on the phone with Apple customer service, the “contract” I “agreed to when pre-ordering” was “non-transferable”, even though *I* am the primary account holder for all four of our family iPhones, my son is a minor (without a credit card so I’d have to order for him anyway) and that I could give them whatever they required to switch just the phone number.

Basically telling me to go pound sand, the order was cancelled. So rather than get his new iPhone 4 on July 14th, he’s back in the queue for an August 3rd delivery. I understand that Apple can’t make exceptions when selling/activating millions of devices, but this seemed so easy to do that the end result is me pissed off and my son one sad little guy.

Thanks Apple.