The hard disk of my laptop died on me last week. Since I’ve ordered a new machine (see previous post) I wanted my system up-and-running without too much effort. An old disk fixed the hardware issue, now the software recovery.

Backups always work. Restores fail all the time.

Last christmas I decided to use SafeCopy as the cloud based solution to backup my files. I bought the 200Gb package and setup all my machines at home to backup files with the software provided. The initial backup took 24 hours per machine, but that is what vacations are for :).

Next to the SafeCopy backup I copy the files to and external disk every month. For this I use the Microsoft SyncToy and set it to contribute, which means files are added and replaced, but never removed. The VHD that I work with is copied too.

I installed Windows 7 on the new/old disk and copied the VHD to it. The I used bcdedit to add the VHD to the boot list. (steps here) The whole process took me about an hour.

My luck was that I was anticipating a new machine this month. My Team Foundation workspace had no checkouts and changes were safely in a shelveset. New files are on the SafeCopy cloud drive and older files are also on my external disk. I lost nothing with this crash. When my new machine arrives I will be setting up SafeCopy again and continue to use my backup plan as described above.