It's been a bad week for technology in this house.

First, my desktop Mac suddenly decided it didn't like the look of the network. Everything was working, and plugged in, but all of a sudden, no connectivity. I fixed this, using a utility program from my utility belt. OK, I lied about the belt.

This, however, revealed a bigger problem with the hard disk. A problem which caused the Mac to run so slow, you could time file saves with a calendar.

The solution was to format and reinstall the badly-fragmented system drive. No problem. All my user settings, documents, pictures, music and video resided on separate partitions to the operating system.

This is when the real fun started. The disk utility to prepare the partition for formatting and reinstallation, wiped the system partition, and then, just for giggles, wiped the document and video partitions. Naturally, this occurred at 1am - the time of day when (as any geek will tell you) the really bad shit happens. Let's face it, if you're going to make critical data rescue decisions, you might as well do it when you're half asleep. Where would the fun be if you were fully alert?

So yes, four and a half years of memories, work, and music, gone.

And no, I didn't have a backup. Come on, it's a 100 gigabyte disk. WTF do you think I'm going to back it up onto? A passing super-computer? Give me a break.

On the upside, most of my DMfM writing, all letters and email, are on my iBook

Oh, and did I mention that whilst this was going on, my roommate's PC had to be formatted and reinstalled, which would have been alright, if later that same day, her Palm organiser hadn't crashed, requiring a hard reboot, without having first backed up the data on the newly formatted PC?

Yes, this house was under a techno-curse.

On Saturday, I set about lifting the curse. With teeth gritted, a determined glint in my eye, and my favourite shirt, I set off to see the folk at Apple.

I returned, my head reeling with the scent of Powerbooks and iPod Minis, clutching some data recovery software and a cable. I also returned with the kind of feeling of Linda Hamilton. Well, OK, maybe not quite as extreme, but I sure as shit wasn't going to take any more nonsense from my computers.

Fast forward to tonight. 30 hours later, and the software has been chugging away on the iBook, which has the Mac connected to it in such a way that the iBook thinks that it's just one big external hard drive. This, at least, is an improvement on being a big external paperweight, which is what it had been doing an impression of beforehand.

Thirty hours later, and it's catalogued exactly one third of the disk. So the Maths geniuses amongst you will have worked out that it's going to take 90 hours to do the whole disk. That's just six hours short of four days. To reiterate, this is just the cataloguing of what was once there. I'm just praying that the file retrieval is faster (it should be).

On the upside, I should get back years of lost photographs, including those of Miles from his first day, through to this year. You can't put a price on memories, but if you did, it'd be $69.95.