Also, I’m researching an appropriate back up solution, JKs comment above is really making me think about it a bit more. So would scheduling a couple of full system/drive images with something like Acronis True Image, and then doing incremental backups on top of that be a good solution?

Wow! That just made my day right there. I know how you feel when you lose everything, although what I lost wasn’t nearly as important. My hard drive in my desktop failed a few years back, and nothing I could do would bring it back. Then a couple months afterwards, I decided to try it with a USB to IDE adapter and it came right up and I got my data…

Vista and Shadow Copies – I’ve used it before, too, but I never even thought about it. Yeah for the Vista team!

Oh man, I am so happy to read this! Your originally post made my stomach churn. Flashbacks to my PalmOS PDAs hard-resetting and taking many months of non-HotSynced data to Electron Hell. At least yours was only in Electron Purgatory!

Glad you were able to get back your files. I can’t offer software solution, I work mainly on the UNIX side of things. But I can offer some backup principles, at least from my point of view (other opinions might differ). First, most backup space is at least 2 1/2 times the original data, enough for 2 full backup and some incremental. Second is the schedule of the backup, how frequent the full backup will be done, the incremental. Attached to that is the retention time of the backup, how old is the backup before you start rewriting over it. Backup is not an archiving system. One major thing, check the content of the backup every so often, as you are unfortunately aware, it can happen that backups aren’t done right (there are some horror IT stories there).

These concepts assume that you are not doing a syncing style of backup, which to me is not proper way of doing a backup. I guess my main suggestion is to determine how you want to do your backup then find the software that will enable you to do it.

For work, as an IT guy, I use a retention of 6 weeks, full weekly, and incrementally daily. For home, well… as we say in french “Le cordonnier est toujours le plus mal chaussé” which sort of translate into “The shoe-maker has the worse shoes”, I know it there is an english expression for that. But basically, I do a backup once every 6 months, except for my photos which I put immediately to 2 CDs. It’s bad, but there is nothing really important apart for the pictures.

Yep, Home Server is something I am considering. I’ve heard good things so far from those who are already trying it out. Look me up in Seattle, Matt. I’m easy to find, usually the only cartoon head walking around.

Great to see you were able to recover everything. This is a case, that Windows Home Server would be a good thing to use. With its nightly backups and the ability to pick apart certain backups…this would have been solved nicely.

But again, good to hear you were able to recover everything. Hope to see ya at the MVP summit next week as well.

Whoo! Congrats! :D I’m glad you were able to recover. :)