My mac corrupted it's disk wednesday morning while at a SOA conference in NYC. In the snow. (Uphill, both ways. Without shoes. Barefoot. Feet? You had feet?) Thankfully, I also carry a Thinkpad running XP... Who am I kidding - it was a disaster.
It happened when the mac overheated - it closed it's lid, put it in the bag at the Starbucks before going to a meeting earlier that morning, and when I pulled it out, it was still on, very hot, fans madly clacking and screaming. It was still running (try that w/ the Thinkpad and see new and interesting BSODs). However, both CPU cores were pegged and the machine was sluggish. I did initiate a shutdown, and when it seemed to hang on the way down, I shut it down hard. Big mistake. Next time booting I saw the dreaded "file-folder w/ question mark" icon, which means both "system unable to find bootable operating system image" as well as "you're *beep*ed" (this is a family-friendly blog..)
So, beep-ed I was. I called Apple, made an appointment at the "Genius Bar" at the 5th Avenue Apple Store, and at noon, caught a cab and got up there. (Amazing how easy it is to catch a cab in NYC during snow storms....) The "genius" told me that yep, I was beep-ed. He was happy to reformat the drive for me. Given I've been a subscriber to the "faith-based computing" paradigm lately (aka no backups), that wasn't going to happen except as a last resort (after forensic data recovery, for example, although I hadn't quite worked out how to explain *that* on my expense report...). He was then happy to sell me DiskWarrior, set me up at the end of the bar with power, and wished me luck. He also let me take out my Thinkpad and use that for email while waiting for DiskWarrier to boot and do it's stuff (45 min!) but only on the condition I kept the mac in full view at all times.
Magically, DiskKeeper was able to rebuild the directory tree, with a loss of only a few OS files (resulting in an unbootable system, of course). I figured I was safe, and left the Temple of Steve, and went back to the SOA conference, and then home to continue the work. By the way, the 5th Ave Temple of Steve (59th and 5th) is simply stunning :
You walk in the front of the cube and down a circular staircase to the big store floor. If you are in NYC, it's worth a look if you find this sort of thing interesting. (The one in SOHO is nice too...)
Anyway, that night I bought a 260G LaCie firewire drive ("designed by F.A. Porsche" who I assume is a specialist in simple square metal boxes with a mirrored front), and backed up the entire laptop hard disk. I tried to fool the OS X installation disk to simply upgrade and archive OSX, saving my user prefs, but due to disk space limits and damage to the OS, it didn't work. Yesterday morning, I did a full wipe of the drive, fresh OS install, created a new personal account, and then replaced my home directory with that from the LaCie backup.
I'm amazed how much was restored. The only things missing that I've discovered so far is a driver for Parallels (I simply need to re-install), my license key for Keynote, and I'm guessing my license key for QT Pro, and my QT MPEG-2 playback component, all of which I can get back from the online Apple Store w/o a hassle. My ControlPanel enhancements (like Growl) all came over w/ that home directory copy. It's utterly amazing. As far as I can tell, there's been no loss. I hadn't saved two OmniOutliner documents (I use it for todo list management and time tracking), and it was able to recover from its own periodic background saves.
Oh, and one more thing :) This experience validated my decision last year to go "all in" with IMAP (hosted by Tuffmail). While doing the restore yesterday (which took a while), I was able to pick up another Thinkpad running Ubuntu, fire up Thunderbird, and see all my mail, and all my archives. No interruption. No loss. And full confidence that any email work I did on that thinkpad would be reflected on the Mac once I got back up. If you tend to be multi-client, or don't backup like you should :) consider IMAP. Good support on Thunderbird (so you can use the same client on Windows, Linux and OS X, and the OS X Mail.app has good support as well (that's what I use, for aesthetic reasons...)
You should also take a look at SuperDuper, which is great for doing incremental backups of a system image.
Thanks - that was next on my list, to abandon the faith-based approach. Current plan is some kind of SOHO NAT, like a Buffalo Terastation, for the hardware, but needed decent (and painless) bu software.
Well, what can I say? I have an external FireWire drive I bought a month ago after buying my first Mac. Originally, I wrote some custom shell scripts that were driving rdiff-backup, but after I moved from iMac G5 to MacBook Pro, I gave up on that (since I would have to go through the hell reinstalling rdiff-backup in fink because of changed processor architecture, which in itself isn't particularly painful, but there's the additional pain of correctly installing customized Python scripts for handling HFS attributes...). Now I have an alert in iCal that fires every friday at 20:00 and tells me to backup. What I do is simply use Disk Utility to mirror my drive on the external drive when I finish the work week. In case internal drive craps, I can just boot from the external one directly. Never had to do it fortunately, but I did have to restore my Keychain Access once after I used Safari's "Reset Safari..." menu command and it cleared all passwords from Keychain Access that started with "http://" (even though I entered them manually).
Regardless of all of the above, I very much like your idea of using an external mail provider with IMAP interface.