murphy strikes back
As Raza just pointed out in a comment, I've been silent the past few days. Unfortunately this was due to a hard drive failure on my G5 Friday morning. I've been recovering since then. I had backups and the few things I didn't have backed up I was able to restore. Plus while all this was going on I figured it's a good time to redo alot of stuff. So I purchased 2 200gb drives and set them up in RAID 1 (mirrored) so that this never happens again, I purchased and installed tiger (which makes doing RAID very easy), I installed all the latest version of all the software I use and so on. I don't really have the heart to go into all the details, it's been to traumatic but I do want to point to a few excellent pieces of software which saved my butt.
SuperDuper - which makes it super easy to create full backups of your system. Not just backups but 100% complete and working copies. This really saved me because I had this backing up to a firewire drive. So when the main drive died I was able to still boot the computer by holding down "t" during startup which made the mac boot from the firewire drive. Worked perfect. That let me install:
Data Rescue X - which did an amazing job of going through the dead drive and finding everything that was recoverable. I only had a week or so missing from the backup, but there were some important things there that I needed. It was amazing, because the drive wouldn't mount, but Rescue X was able to get on there and pull back that data that wasn't destroyed.
I'm just getting things rolling again now. This set me back a few days, but hopefully I've got everything covered now. I've moved into full paranoia mode with the RAID, plus firewire backup, plus I wrote scripts to move critical data to the server. I should have been more thorough before, but that's how it goes.