There's two ways you can improve the hard drive's ability to recover from crashes. If you intend to only use that hard drive on Macs, then you should consider formatting it in the Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system. The journalling vastly improves the volume's ability to recover from serious errors.
In any case, you had a backup, which is good! That's exactly what you should do, especially when trying out new computers and new platforms. As you've found out, sometimes migrating to new operating system (be it Ubuntu, OS X, or something else) is a bit of a bumpy ride. But I can tell you that you'll probably thank yourself for it in the long run.
While I do work with computers a lot, I am not so familiar with the intrinsic differences between different disk file systems. Would you be able to explain why a "journalized" system is better in case of failures?
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I'll answer that question with Wikipedia:
Updating file systems to reflect changes to files and directories usually requires many separate write operations. This introduces a race condition for which an interruption (like a power failure or system crash) between writes can leave data structures in an invalid intermediate state.
For example, deleting a file on a Unix file system involves two steps:
1. Removing its directory entry.
2. Marking space for the file and its inode as free in the free space map.
If a crash occurs between steps 1 and 2, there will be an orphaned inode and hence a storage leak. On the other hand, if only step 2 is performed first before the crash, the not-yet-deleted file will be marked free and possibly be overwritten by something else.
In a non-journaled file system, detecting and recovering from such inconsistencies requires a complete walk of its data structures. This can take a long time if the file system is large, and there is relatively little I/O bandwidth.
A journaled file system maintains a journal of the changes it intends to make, ahead of time. After a crash, recovery simply involves replaying changes from this journal until the file system is consistent again. The changes are thus said to be atomic (or indivisible) in that they either:
* succeed (have succeeded originally or be replayed completely during recovery), or
* are not replayed at all (are skipped because they had not yet been completely written to the journal).
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Yes, pretty bumpy... but having 3 copies of my data (two in the apartment and one in the office) helps to minimize losses in cases like this. I actually never had to use the backup and was getting lazier doing them. You can rest assured that this is going to put me on my toes
I am moving data around today (not so quick when the data is about 0.5TB) and I am reformatting one drive at a time to be Mac OS X file system (with journalize, whatever that means). Hopefully this will add security to my data.
I can tell you though that it was quite a surprise after I have been going around my friends and co-workers praising how much better my new mac was, to find out that in a few seconds one of my data drives was totally wiped.
