Crash and Burn

Guess what the Bloke did yesterday? I woke up early and thought it was time to make a backup. But instead I wiped out my hard drive! So how on earth could an experienced geek like me do such a thing? Well apparently quite easily and maybe that’s why they call it ‘experience’. Here are the gruesome details.

Part of the problem is that I was half asleep and hadn’t done it for a long (long) time. And so instead of backing up with ‘Win XP’s Automated System Recovery‘ (not thinking) I rebooted and started doing a restore from an older backup. At the time I was also distracted by a phone call (that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it). And to make sure the damage was complete I (unfortunately) turned off ‘System Restore‘ to make space for the backup. Duh!

And so the scene was set for disaster, and when it prompted me for the old backup file, (still thinking I was backing up instead of restoring), I deleted the only backup that I had (to make space for the new backup of course). Ok, give me a break… it seemed logical at the time, and the split second after I deleted it I realized (too late) what I had done. Dufus!

By the way, did I mention during the restore process it also formats the hard drive? Ever get that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach? Multiply that by a hundred fold. Doh!

And so the Bloke screwed himself big time. No big deal right? All I had to do was ‘unformat’ that hard drive. BUT guess what? XP doesn’t have that function, and the utilities out there don’t do XP either! Crikey! And so the Bloke has to reinstall Windows and all his software!

BUT what about my data you say? Well, I use software like Datakeeper to make real time backups to a second hard drive, and I’m praying real hard that it’s still there! I’ll keep you posted.

Lessons the Bloke has learned:

1. DO NOT attempt to do a backup or restore when you are half asleep!

2. DO NOT allow yourself to be distracted by telephone calls etc.

3. DO NOT delete an old backup unless you are absolutely SURE you will not need it.

4. ALWAYS check the documentation if your brain cells are in disrepair.

5. NO MATTER how smart I think I am I can be really stupid sometimes.