So. One of the guys who I work with has an external FireWire hard drive on which he has hundreds of gigabytes of stuff. Business stuff, personal stuff, original artwork stuff, photography stuff, company Web site stuff, corporate flyer stuff, and much other stuff.

This stuff is not backed up.

Today he tells me the drive won’t mount. A quick sniff with a disk repair program suggests that the drive’s partition map is gone. Not corrupt, not garbled, gone.

I’m running a surface scan with a file salvaging program now. It’s gonna take all night.

*sigh*