Tuesday night, I encountered a truly painful experience. I backed up my three partitions to a firewire external drive as disk images. Then I repartitioned my PowerBook to have just one big partition. When I went to restore from the external drive, one of the three disk images was no good. All of the files were on it in the right places, with the right sizes, but their content was all zeros. Unfortunately, this was the partition with all of my iTunes library and iPhoto library, including the pictures from our vacation to DisneyWorld and the Kennedy Space Center. I'm probably going to send the PowerBook's drive off to one of the recovery companies. Since, worst case, the files have been overwritten with zeros, the originals should be recoverable. Here's hoping.