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Last Saturday was a dark day.  It didn’t start out that way, but somewhere along the way it took a drastic turn for the worst.  Let me explain.My weekends are typically full of projects around the house.  Some having to do with Watthacking, but mostly I settle into projects that have a home improvement theme.  This weekend I was installing a new gas stove for the failing 1945 Wedgewood.  The thermostat had been wacky for a while, but we lived with it until gas started pouring out the knob that controls the oven.  This quickly ignited into a foot long blow torch shooting out the front of the range and causing some excitement but no injuries.  A month long search for parts ended in despair and the need to buy a new stove.   I looked around for a while, but eventually settled on a GE Café series slide in stove.   In you care about the spec, you can see them here:  GE Café Gas Stove, but really this article is about computer backup and data recovery.

After a day of heavy lifting and wrench work in tight places, I walked into the office to do a little work on the watthackers site.   Now with my power settings in Windows Vista, I have to hit the space bar wake everything up.  Instead of the normal login screen, a message slowly faded in:  “Operating System not Found.”  I restarted the computer thinking that it was an oddball error, but still the system would not load. In a semi-panicked state, I spent the next 30 minutes isolating the problem – bad hard drive.

Real Men Backup

Now I back up (really I do,) but I have never needed to rely on a backup to recover a whole drive.   I guess this weekend was my time to learn.  I started off thinking I could recover the Master Boot Record (MBR) and/or NTFS Partition.  Sure that sounds like I know what I’m doing, but I read it somewhere online – didn’t work.  Next step was a scan of the drive using a file recovery program.  In total the program ran for 32 hours and recovered something like 123,000 files – all named in sequence order: F123456, F123457, F123458.  I looked at a few files, most were crap, and decided that the best strategy would be to set the 400 gig drive aside and see what I needed to recover in the future.  If you need a windows file recovery tool, try Recuva.

Never write to a drive that you can’t access your data on.  You would be surprised how much data is recoverable and still there, but every time you write data to the drive you overwrite and destroy data.  If you can, set the drive aside and perform you recovery effort when you are not tired and freaked out.    

For now, I needed to focus on rebuilding the system, but the wind was knocked out of my sails, so I shut down the computer for the night.

The next day, I decided to spend a few hours recovering the system.  This started by installing a new 500 gigabyte drive and popping in the Windows Vista disk.  The install runs, and I remember the joy of configuring the system for the first time.  The problem is, most computer configuration is done over time, so your setup is only as safe as record keeping.  Vista did a decent job recovering my system. All the files and setting since the last backup were restored, but none of the programs or external devices were reconfigured.  This means all the software needed to be installed along with printers, wifi router, etc. 

Software Activation Sucks   

 After installing Windows Vista, I inserted the Adobe CS3 suite disk, then the Office 2007 disk, etc, etc.  What I failed to realize is that you need to uninstall the software from the pc if you want to reactivate it.  Now since my computer didn’t pop up a message saying it was about to seriously take a dump, I didn’t feel the need to uninstall all my software.  You don’t uninstall your software “just in case” do you?

So after a few hours of installations and reboots, I get to sit on hold with Microsoft and Adobe only to read off a bizillion numbers to some overseas phone-jockey and tell them my hard drive crashed.  There needs to be a better way. 

Back up more frequently

I don’t know what the right frequency is, but my last complete backup was January 16, 2008. That’s about 6 weeks worth of data that I may need to mine off the dead hard drive, if I even can.  I should slap myself – hard.  My back up strategy consisted of an external 500 gigabyte hard drive that is solely for backups.  I know I won’t do the DVD thing, so I went with the hard drive route.  The only problem with the hard drive is that it’s not always on.  When power goes out, the drive will not turn back on until you push the little switch.  I pulled the power to the computer circuit to test the power usage of my PC.  In doing so, I shut off the backup hard drive and prevented any backups after this point. 

1. Plan you backup strategy – Have you even made the recover disks that your laptop should have come with? Take the time to think through the steps for recovering from a hardware failure.
2. Be anal, be redundant – Show me someone who backs up nightly and I will guarantee they don’t sweat a hard drive failure. In my crash, the biggest concern I had was my digital photo collection. However, I have that backed up onto two separate drives plus the backup. Anal, yes – piece of mind, priceless.
3. Your hard drives conspire - If you use an external drive, DVD, CD or even a floppy drive to backup, don’t think for a minute that they don’t talk. They’re like, “hey hard drive… I haven’t seen a backup in a loooooooong time, ” then your hard drive crashes. Your hard drive will never crash during or immediately after a backup.
4. Remote backups – I know everyone is supposed to backup offsite, but I’m just not feeling the love yet. After my recent episode, I looked at a variety of online solutions such as Carbonite and was discouraged by the recovery times. Some quoted two or more days in the event of a complete data loss. The price is right, the constant backup is nice, and you don’t pay the power bill for the backup (a big plus for watthackers,) but I can’t get over the simple fact that all my data is sitting on someone’s server.
5. All your data is not valuable – Of the 123,000 files recovered from my hard drive, I bet less than 100 were worth recovering. We never delete files and our hard drives become the digital equivalent of the junk drawers in our kitchens. Have a strategy to delete files that you don’t use. Keep your temp and Browser cache clean and you will save a huge amount of time if you ever need to find a particular document.
6. Make a thumb drive with all your critical information – create files with passwords, user names, email addresses, phone numbers, critical documents, etc. zip all the files up and password protect the archive file. Update it once a quarter and store it in a safe place; preferably offsite. If you don’t have an offsite storage location, email it to a web-based account such as Gmail or hotmail.
7. Know where your recovery tools are – It never fails that when I need a windows boot disk, it’s nowhere to be found. I end up tearing the house apart then searching online via the laptop. Buy a small CD case and make sure your CD/DVD collection for the current system is in there. Mark it as your PC emergency kit and put it someplace where you will remember it.
8. When recovering, install your antivirus software LAST – I will probably get killed for saying this, but install all the cornerstone software first. Windows, Office, Adobe, TurboTax, whatever, so long as it’s a big name program. Smokey Joe’s Free Software Finder and MP3 play should be installed after the antivirus software. I have wasted countless hours telling my over zealous antivirus software that it’s okay to install Photoshop. Of course that only goes for the legit versions of the software. Torrent users should ignore this tip.
9. Uninstall applications you don’t use – Another tip on how to save time later if you crash; uninstalling the software that you don’t use will help reduce the number of files to recover and wade through to find what you want. All that free software that came on your laptop; loose it – after all, when was the last time you loaded it?
10. Back up today – Here I am, 10 days later with a working system, creating new files, and I still have not backed up. Grab a hard drive or a fist full of DVDs and backup today. It will mean one less day that you don’t have data for in the event of a crash. I’m going to backup now.

Technorati Tags: computer backup, data recovery, gas stove, hard drive, master boot record, mbr, partition, power settings, Vista Restore, Windows backup, Windows Vista backup

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