My primary PC suffered a fatal drive failure of the mechanical kind last week. No amount of software massaging could make it bootable again.
It was a 400GB drive, packed with everything, including all my trip photos and videos; all my business data; music; all my personal correspondence; everything.
I'm a backup fanatic, and although I've been less rigorous (a less kind word: anal) about backups since I stopped publishing a 2x-weekly newsletter, I still have been pretty good about them.
As a result of the backups, plus what I could pull off the damaged hard drive with recovery software, I've lost very little, except time. One recovery tool, for example (Spinrite) chewed on the dead drive for 40 hours, nonstop. Four hundred gigs is a lot of ones and zeros to examine.
I finally gave up on the idea of recovery and went for salvage. Then, using new hard drives, I've been rebuilding my system from the ground up.
Looking at my master sets of backups, I can see that the last time I had to do a full reinstall was back in 2004; a pretty good run for a system as heavily used as mine was. Plus, what brought the system down was an unpreventable mechanical problem; not a software issue caused by poor maintenance.
But that's what I've been doing the last few days, with maybe another day to go before everything's back as it should be. I'm taking this opportunity to update a lot of non-system software because the versions I had were good enough, as-is; but not worth resurrecting if I have to do a clean install anyway.
I also took advantage of the crash to clean the PC physically and get everything spiffy again.
It's a huge investment of time, but with luck, I'll have another 4-year run with very few problems.
I'm writing this on my laptop, which really isn't very good as a full-time office PC. That's also why I've been away from the blog for a few days. But soon, I should have my main PC fully set up and populated with my data files again, and can back to what passes for normal.
Meanwhile, thanks for the notes and emails! I appreciate hearing from you, and will be back online ASAP.
Fred, I have enjoyed your newsletters for years and I am really enjoying your blog. You are doing the things I wish I was doing. I have been using a Windows Home Server for about a year and find it easy to keep up to 10 Windows computers backed up and even allows a full re-install (although I have yet to need it). It works in the background and gives you the side benefit of a home server for file sharing. It is reasonably priced and easy to maintain. Just my thoughts. I also completely agree about a laptop as a business computer, I am stuck on a full sized keyboard.
ReplyDeleteHello Fred!
ReplyDeleteI also take a lot of pride in keeping my systems in good shape. In these days our family rely a lot on our PC's, reading mail, searching the web, homebanking and so on. But in the field of backup, I'm not sure if I'm covered good enough.
Is it possible, that You could use this opportunity to describe Your backup-setup?
Best regards and thanks for a lot of good and usefull writing!
Morten, Denmark