When DiskWarrior finished its work, I debated attempting to clone the drive in its entirety. I knew it was damaged and that I couldn't trust it, but I wanted a copy of its data. My TUAW friends and senior editor Dan Frakes all counseled against the clone; copying all that data would require accessing every part of the drive, risking damaging it again or further.

The saner approach, and the one I adopted, was to copy only the data that I needed. So I copied over only the folders containing my most recently-updated files, and I did so in priority order--the stuff I cared about the most got copied first. (I copied data to a separate USB drive connected to the same Mac mini.)

And indeed, at some point during the copying, the MacBook Pro's drive failed again. Fortunately, that happened only after I had copied off the data I was most focused on. Now it was time to get at the rest of my data. I debated how best to go about restoring my data. I had the local SuperDuper and Time Machine backups, but they were old. Even though I knew I had grabbed the most-recently updated files I needed, I was a bit concerned about losing tiny bits of updated data (say, a photo or two, or a freshly-downloaded MP3) if I relied on those backups alone.

I was confident enough with my backups and my ability to recreate the basic state my MacBook Pro had been in that I decided I was comfortable not restoring in full from my SuperDuper backup; instead, I elected to repopulate my new drive--more than that soon--piecemeal, from several of my backup sources.

I ended up restoring big swaths of files--including my user Library folder, Pictures, Movies, and Music--from the SuperDuper backup. Then I manually compared those backups to my online CrashPlan backup, and filled in some missing files. That was painstaking work, but I'm glad I did it.