I know I know i'm a bit of a PC nerd, however in a minor bout of karma I need a little help.

About two days after I advised my friend to buy one of those Apple Time Capsule things her hard drive failed. And the Time Capsule thing had not been bought. Therefore nothing has backed up.

She's running one of the white macbooks (I'll assume you know what this version is that i'm talking about because I don't!) and Apple have said that it's a common fault with that model, so they will replace the hard drive for free after she's recovered all her data.

Now the problem is she's asked me to get her data for her, but i'm stumped. Will I just be able to copypasta everything if I put her Mac HDD into an external caddy? Or will it be different? Are the connections just standard for a 2.5" HDD?

Help please =D

Right, okay, now then...

The drive is just a standard 2.5in unit, usually either SATA or PATA. The problem you will face is the formatting is called HFS+, and it's unlikely your PC will be able to read it properly in order to preserve the data in Mac format, if it mounts it at all.

So, that's where my Mac geek knowledge runs out. Let's hope someone else can come up with some knowledge.

Where is your friend to take the broken machine? Is it an Apple Store or an authorised repair centre? It might be worth considering asking them nicely if they might be prepared to make a backup of the drive data under the circumstances. It will probably cost money to do that, but if the data is worth saving it's worth paying for most likely.

Well i'm fairly sure that I can get access to a Mac if I need, as I know quite a few Maccers, and IIRC one of them has an external HDD for storing all his music etc on.

Which means that this external HDD would be a good place to store all the info I rip off her Mac if it's in some special format?

She took it to the apple store in London and they told her that they could take the data off but that it would cost a few hundred, which both she and I thought was absolutely ridiculous for some photos, music and old uni-work! Her dad offered the help of his tech team at work, however they're all PC based and she doesn't really like them.. I'm guessing that she's got some things that she would rather daddy didn't see and she can keep an eye on me when I do it ^_^

A few hundred is a lot for retrieving that stuff, for sure.

Okay, if you have access to a Mac, and another external drive, then all should be good.

A word about formatting: The Mac OS uses HFS+ (sometimes called HFS extended) for the main boot drive. If you buy ready made externals from LaCie or whoever, I've found they come preformatted for Mac and have to be redone for use on a PC. The Mac OS can read and write to almost every disk format out there, but it's very much happier with HFS+.

I think what I'm trying to say is as long as the external drive you're copying to is supported by the Mac OS, you should be fine.

If you can mount both drives on the Mac, you can literally just drag your friend's User folder* into the new drive. When the cursor changes to show a plus symbol (whoa! just like Windows!) over the destination disk, let go the mouse button. That's it. Go for a cup of something, maybe a meal, a weekend away, whatever. If you're copying by USB, it's going to take geological epoch to do, so it's literally best to leave the machine to get on with it.

*The Mac OS follows a Unix-like structure, so at the top level you'll see a set of folders for Applications, Documents, Library, System, Users. The stuff you want is contained in the latter folder, and is usually named for the user when the machine is first set up. In my case, it's "Heather". It might be worth checking if any third party (non-standard Apple stuff) applications have been installed, and make sure installers or archives can be located, or you can just copy those apps from the Applications folder. Many apps on the Mac are self-contained units, making them very easy to move and archive.

Hope all that helps. If you get stuck, you know where to come.

Thanks heather =)

I'm fairly certain it's a supported HDD - looks like the Mac Mini and is white ^_^ - so that should be no problem.

Might have a problem with this "one button" thing though. No right click... having to rely on drag and drop...? Beggars belief! >.<

The mouse with a nipple on? Try right clicking. You might be surprised.

Or the trackpad? In which case, use the Control key to give you contextual menus.



Apple developed the OS so most anything can be done with menus, shortcuts and single clicks. I rarely need the contextual menu as it's all supported elsewhere. It just seems strange when you come from an environment where lots of extra stuff is under your right finger button.

All depends on who's mac I use to do the transfer, but i'm sure they can guide me through it. I think i'll only be there for the confidence to physically take something out of it and put it into a caddy to be honest ^_^

Is it an option to ask Apple to give you back the old removed hard drive? That would avoid the expensive data recovery from Apple.

Assuming you have the removed hard drive, there are a couple of options, as Heather has outlined...

1. Whack the HD in an external hard drive, connected to the Mac with newly installed hard drive - does the hard drive mount onto the desktop? If yes, then simply drag over what you need - make sure you reformat it afterwards if you intend using it for backing up. If it doesn't mount, try launching Disk Utility, and if it's recognised run "Repair Disk" over it to, hopefully, fix things. If Disk Utility doesn't recognise it, then you may have more luck with something more heavyduty, like DiskWarrior, Drive Genius, TechTool Pro - although all these aren't exactly cheap (between £40-70). Still cheaper than the hundreds asked by Apple though.

2. Buy a piece of software for Windows called MacDrive ($49 / approx £34)- this will allow the PC to read HFS+ formatted drives from within Windows, so you can retrieve data files from the hard drive - I wouldn't try to copy any system files - just concentrate on the files within the "Users" folder as the system and applications can easily be restored, whereas your data is more important.

I don't really need to say this, but external hard drives are so ridiculously cheap now, make sure she has a decent backup in place when the hard drive is replaced. SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner are both good backup utilities which will create a bootable backup clone of your internal drive. Superduper is shareware (you can use it free, but paying unlocks the advanced features) whereas CCC is free anyway - this is what I use.

As nice as the Time Capsule might be to use, there are far cheaper options to go for if you don't mind it being non-Apple.

I would reinforce that you do not need Time Capsule to use Time Machine, and USB (or firewire?) hard drive will do.

If I were in this situation, I wouldn't be doing any of the above.

I would throw the drive into a caddy, and image the whole thing. Quite why you would only copy the user folder is beyond me.

If you image the whole drive, then when you buy a new drive, you can just expand the image onto that drive and hey-presto, you'd never notice the difference. I reckon it's less effort than installing OS X onto the new drive anyway (not that installing OS X is hard work, just that telling a machine to expand an image and then forgetting about it is a little easier than clicking through then copying).

One other thing, you say the drive has failed...How do you plan to get files off of it? Or do Apple think the logic board has failed somewhere?

If the drive is dead, the drive is dead (OK, you can replace platters if you dare, you could even try replacing the interface because it might just be the electronics)...

Quite. Data recovery from a dead drive will cost a few hundred quid, unless you're incredibly lucky.

My thinking was to get the minimum essential information you can if that's all you can get. It's what I would do if I was in a hurry. Sure, if there's space on the target drive, take the whole shooting match.