As you might remember some weeks ago, when I attended the annual Microsoft MVP summit, I bought an Apple iPod with 40 GB storage space!
While the iPod was initially bought to hold my complete music collection plus the one or the other file, now it became my preferred data recovery drive!
As you might have seen yesterday, the "My Documents" hard drive of my main PC decided to die. Well, actually it's not dead but Windows XP doesn't recognizes it as already formatted but told me it's not formatted. Thanks to Carlo I've tested GetDataBack for NTFS and it found - more or less - all my files as far as I've seen. However - the HDD is 40 GB and the available space on my second HDD is 20 GB only.

GetDataBack works like this: it scrawls your defective drive and creates a list of files it can possibly recover - bit by bit, cluster by cluster (the process itself takes very long and I did it last night). Then it offers you to "copy" the recoverable files to a new location and from there they are back!
But again - recovering a 40 GB HDD requires another 40 GB HDD and because this driver is already the slave, I wasn't able to plug-in the new hard disk - I already bought - to copy it to there. So I was in need of a solution.
The solutions stood in front of me, my beloved iPod which includes a 40 GB hard disk as well and is connected via FireWire to my PC!

FireWire provides data transfer speeds up to 400 Mbps (megabits per second) which is fairly enough since it is 4 times faster than my home LAN (so copying it to another computer - my second alternative takes 4 times longer).
So I moved all the files from my iPod back to my Notebook to clean it up and XP recognized it (I've installed XP as a fresh copy on my PC) immediately as FireWire hard disk, even without installing iTunes.
No it was easy going: in GetDataBack I had to select the storage drive and there I also found my iPod. The rest was done by the software, the PC, the FireWire connection and my iPod.

The iPod, I bought primarily as my MP3 player and secondarily as a mobile HDD for my Notebook saved my life and my data! Woohoo... The 499 US$ was the best buy I had in the past months and it already paid off. For the last 3 weeks as my mobile music companion and now as my recovery storage #1. Wonder how to handle the data recovery with my new 160 GB HDD if this happens again... Buying additional 3 iPods? ;-)

And yes, I have to admit that my Pocket PCs and Smartphones wasn't able to help me here. Even if they prevents me from a lot of hassle and trouble, this time they wasn't able to help... Microsoft, will we ever see a Pocket PC with a 120 GB HDD which can be accessed directly without having ActiveSync in the middle? ;-)

Cheers ~ Arne