The hard drive in my Macbook Pro died last night. I’ve spent the last 24 hours doing every data recovery method I know of and so far it isn’t looking good. I have 
a backup but it’s two weeks old (yes, I am teh dumbs), which means I’ve lost all the original comic files for about 6 comics. I’m still trying to recover them. Yes, I put the drive in the freezer. First for an hour (which did not help) and then over night (which doesn’t seemed to have helped).
There won’t be a comic today for obvious reasons. I’m going to have to go buy a new HD, restore from my backup then figure out what I’ve really lost. Most likely it will be a few important emails that weren’t on gmail, 6 comics or so, some recent freelance work, all of my todo lists (see, I put everything into Things about a week ago and trashed all my paper lists! Yay!) and probably a few odds and ends that I won’t realize are gone until I really need them.
Thanks to everyone that offered suggestions on Twitter last night. I’ll let you know how it goes.
UPDATE:
It looks like some of the Fancy Bastards have taken it upon themselves to help me out with my hard drive woes. Thanks, guys. You are a fantastic bunch of geeks.
UPDATE 2:
You Fancy Bastards have donated enough for me to get the new drive AND a new backup drive with room to spare!
UPDATE 3:
The saga is concluded HERE.
Dang… Sorry to hear about all that – Well, at least HDD's (especially that configuration) aren't that expensive anymore… upgraded mine recently (willingly though) to a faster, larger capacity drive for less than 100 beans… I know, I know, every bean counts… but hey, better a handful of beans than a bushel…
Ill be doing to "walk of infrequent back up shame" to Frys this afternoon. Hopefully I'll have a working machine by this evening. I imagine the restore will take a bit of time.
Man, that sucks so much. I went through something similar when my Macbook Pro was jacked from the office. I was teh dumbs too, as I had it set to backup my data once a week. It happens nightly now.
Have you tried the drive in an external enclosure? If it's recognizable as a disk, you might be able to copy it sector by sector. Maybe.
If the drive is still recognized as existing but you can't get any further – find a friend with a PC and a copy of SpinRite 6. It won't fix a hardware failure – but what it can do is pretty amazing. It's saved my bacon – where by "bacon" I mean "data" – several times.
We have "PC Guru" (Austin) and such…maybe you have one of those shops in your area?
They charge a hefty fee, but they can recover amazing things, They just have bigger
magic than us users. (I have a friend who used to work at one)
Since the Generous FBs have saved you some $$, maybe you can afford teh Pro Save.
I've heard good things about Spinrite recovering data from a hard drive. http://www.grc.com/sr/testimonials.htm
Oh.So terrible.I always forgot to backup frequently
Im insane about it now. Multiple redundant backups always.