Backups: Real World
Saturday morning, I checked my emails. In the middle, I decided to go and make myself an americano. I started the screen saver, and came back 10 minutes later. Moved the mouse to reactive the screen. Nothing, dead! I checked that the computer is turned on, yes the fan is on and the computer light is on the computer case. Tried a few variations of the Alt-Ctrl-Del, nothing, no reboot. Nothing, dead.
I bit the bullet, turned the computer off, waited 15 seconds and turned the computer back on. Before the even Windows started, during the boot process, I got a hard drive SMART error. The Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology that detects and reports on various indicators of reliability of the hard drive, in the hope of anticipating failures. The drive was completely dead. Obviously the SMART did not anticipate the drive failure.
I have an emergency LiveCD to boot from. It's a CD that allows to boot the computer, without touching the hard drive, and that's 100% self-contained. The hard drive was really dead, kaput, frozen. The hard drive didn't even spin anymore. Everything was gone, no realistic possibility of recovery, unless I was willing to spend many thousands of dollars and send the hard drive to a recovery place to open the drive and recover the data from the raw/naked disk platters.
Do I hear backup? Actually, Friday night I did my usual weekly full backup. I already hear people saying: "what a lucky dog! He crashed just after the backup". Actually I'm not lucky, I have many battle scars to prove it. It would have been the same if the crash would have happened 5 minutes before the weekly full backup. The very important stuff is immediately backed-up.
Bare Metal Recovery
I needed to do what in the computer world is called a "Bare Metal Recovery". This means, installing a brand new hard drive, and reloading everything, including the OS, all the programs, all the data and all the security updates.
I went to buy 2 new hard drives, 640Gb each, then went to the beach to photograph a few dogs. When I came back, opened the computer, replaced the drives, vacuumed the computer to remove all the dust, and started to:
- Pull my CDs/DVDs/Serial Numbers
- Install the OS
- Update the OS for all the security updates
- Reload all the "important" programs
- Copy back all the data from my backup
4 hours later, I was back in business. Now it will take me at least a week to re-tweak the system to all my fonts, preferences... I will do this as I go along and do my stuff.
- If you do not do a backup on a schedule, it's not a backup, it's only a copy.
- Are you ready for a bare metal recovery?
One of the best things I ever did was to create a spreadsheet with all my codes and log-ins. It's so much easier to cut and paste them than to type them in! I also did a screen-print of many of my preferences for different programs -all stored in a notebook. It has saved my sanity more times than I can count when I've had hard drive crashes.
MagPie: 29-Mar-2009