This morning I went to do another batch, but this time bravely used the OS X Finder, and in the process unlinked ("deleted", if you will) a bunch of photos because one of the directories had an overlapping name ("DCIM1843"). When it asked,
"Duplicate files, do you want to overwrite or skip or cancel?"
I was like,
"I know for a fact there are no duplicate filenames, so sure, overwrite...."
(because I didn't want to cancel and didn't think about what "skip" might mean, like would it skip that directory?)
Instead it deleted the only copy I had of those 80 photos or so, deleting not just the directory but all the files in it as well. Stupid finder.
So I immediately suspended the machine while I thought, so no filesystem activity occured. Then found this, which gives me hope (but $145), then went and bought an external Firewire drive to image my harddrive, using my MacBook Pro in target mode, using Artur's laptop has a host, moving all data from my laptop (with 'dd') to the firewire drive.
Except I'm only getting 4 MB/s through it, even with two dd's running, one reading, one writing. For 100GB, that's 7.11 hours. Bleh.
Any suggestions to speed this up?