Well, crap. I don't know how important the missed data is, but...there are companies out there that'll recover this stuff for you if you want to give it a try.

The company I work for has often used these guys... http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/

It costed some, but it depends on the data, I guess!

Sorry about the drive!

The main things lost are new photos and music from past few months, some personal notes and writing, some apps, and this year's tax documents (OUCH).

Not worth an expensive service. Fortunately, I have been backing up a lot of my data so it's not a huge disaster. Still painful and a big hassle, though.

just had a repartition tool break halfway through it's job, causing it to hose a completely unrelated partition, I feel your pain. Glad i had most of my stuff backed up, Darkwing Duck and Talespin are toast, however.

Oooh, man. That's a bad one, yeah. Sorry to hear it.

at least AppleCare took good care of you

Yes. While I am disappointed that I've had to use it several times, the AppleCare extended policy has served me well. And they've never given me any hassle or refused to cover something.

very sorry to hear. :(

But doesn't time machine just magically make it's last back up reappear on the new drive?

Wasn't using Time Machine (there's some historical reasons behind that) though now that I have a clean OS install, I'm trying to set it up. It has failed twice trying to get through its initial imaging backup, though.

So I was using scripted rsyncs to an external drive. So most of my data is backed up but not applications, configuration, that sort of thing. On the other hand, it's a chance to do a lot of clean installs and get rid of upgraded-OS-image cruft (see above parenthetical note).

Time for CrashPlan :P

I use both rsnapshot (a script that uses rsync internally) and CrashPlan, for onsite and offsite (at a coworker's house) backups