How I saved a year of our family pictures from a dead hard drive. - Ars Technica OpenForum | Mac Tech Support | Scoop.it
So on Wednesday night, my wife's MBP hard drive suddenly died. Upon a reboot in verbose mode (as the machine wouldn't boot) I was getting the dreaded Bus I/O error when the drive was being accessed. I quickly shut the machine off in order to prevent further damage in case anything was salvageable.

My first thought was "No biggie- we have Time Machine!" So I go and look through the remote TM drive files, and realize that the last time my wife's machine was backed up, was roughly a year ago, around the time we installed Lion on it. Ugh. Tried to connect the MBP in FireWire mode to my Mac Pro- no go.