...turned out not to be too bad.

Yesterday afternoon, my laptop started locking up periodically for a few seconds, then coming?back to life.?I thought it might be because I had a few too many apps open. I routinely run at least one VPC, Outlook, FeedDemon, Maxthon, and Windows Media Player, so it's not unheard of for me to run out of RAM, despite having 2 GB. Or at least have performance degrade enough to temporarily lock up the UI. But, I needed to reboot for something, and as I did, I got write errors saying Windows couldn't write to a bunch of folders on my second drive.

Then, as it was rebooting, it took forever to initialize. And as soon as it came up, I started getting delayed write failure messages. Not good. That continued through the night, and I eventually just gave up, called someone at the office, and got authorization to get a new drive the next day.

Then I thought about all of the stuff I had on that drive, and how much of a pain it was going to be to try to recover from this if I couldn't get any files off of it. I had a lot of stuff backed up. I use Mozy, so the most important documents are backed up - I have almost 1 GB of data up there, including my local pst file and my quicken files. The biggest loss would have been the loss of my Virtual PC drives. There were three that I was worried about, and luckily, most of the code was checked in. I was holding back my check in on my main project since last Friday because of a build, but that would have been my biggest loss. I also would have lost a very key CodeSmith template too, but I could have rebuilt that in a little bit. I think I might have lost the latest changes to my blogging tool too, but that wouldn't have been a major issue either. The biggest problem would have been the sheer time it would take to rebuild those three environments. I have a base VPC to start from (and that wasn't on the bad drive) so I had a base to start from, but it doesn't even have Visual Studio 2005 installed on it.

Anyway, after thinking about that all night, and not sleeping that well (partly from that, and partly because my youngest was having?tubes put in the next morning), I headed over to Best Buy as the doors opened. I picked up two things: a Seagate notebook drive, and a USB drive enclosure. I came home, and threw in the new drive. Formatting it took almost an hour, when I eagerly waited to plug in my old drive, which was installed in the USB drive enclosure.

After it was formatted, I plugged in the old drive, changed the drive letter, and browsed the drive. No errors so far, and I started copying files from it, starting with my most important ones. It was going, and I was happy!

Until it got to a certain point, and all of a sudden, it couldn't read some of my files. I wasn't sure if it was the file, or how long the disk had been plugged in, or what, but it wasn't letting me copy the files I wanted. I could still browse, but no copying.?And it was making a funny noise too. So I picked up the USB drive, and as I was turning it, I realized that it stopped making the noises when it was completely flipped upside down. Figuring it was worth a shot, I turned it upside down, and tried to start copying again.

About an hour later, all 50 GB of data had been pulled from the upside down drive. I then verified a few of the files, and they were all just fine. I was starting to think that maybe I was a?little crazy and my drive was just fine, but?when I tried to have Windows disconnect the USB drive, it said it couldn't because the drive was busy. Then I started getting the write errors again.

Apparently, the drive is read-only now. Which is fine with me - I'm disappointed that a drive that's just over a year old crashed, but at least I was able to get what I needed off of it before it was too late.

All of this has reminded me that my back up strategy is not where it should be. I back up quite a bit of data using Mozy and Foldershare, but not everything. For example, none of my Virtual PC drives are backed up - nor is most of the data on them. Granted, the majority of the stuff I do in VPC is source controlled, but there are one-offs that never get checked in, but are important to me. I think I need to start backing those things up regularly, and I'm thinking the way to do it right now is to use Foldershare to automatically copy my source files from the VPC image to a back up server I have, as well as my base machine and a USB back up drive I have set up. That way, I have the data in three different physical locations (server, USB drive, and laptop), as well as have access to the source code from my main OS on my laptop without having to open VPC (something I have been trying to figure out for a while now).

Then I'll utilize Mozy even more to back up important data. I have 2.5 GB of space there, and only backing up a little less than 1 GB. I could use a lot more of that and be safer!

No matter what I do, I'll be better off than relying on an semi-faulty upside down drive!

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