Diskless Wonder

Welcome to Day 2 of “Hey, Kids, Let’s Rebuild XP!”

I spent the first six hours of yesterday determining that I was not going to be able to recover my 60 gigabyte drive and another three finding out that, despite its reluctance to be noticed by my BIOS or XP in the early stages of rebuilding, my 20 gigabyte drive — the one with the backups on it — was in fact intact. Another 10 hours rebuilding my system and I’m almost minimally functional again.

Pardon me, but does anyone know the right spelling of “Aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrgggggggghhhhhhhhh”?

Here’s where being a paranoid pessimist pays off:

I back up every night, albeit using a rather primitive method: I run batch files that invoke Winzip. The daily backups go onto my computer’s second hard drive … the one that looked like it was gone. Every couple of days, I back up my backups onto my kids’ computer on our home network. Unfortunately, I only back up my 650MB Outlook data file once a week. (Yeah, I know it’s too big.)

I use XP’s save-your-settings wizard so that I can restore my Office apps’ settings, including IE’s favorites. (For some reason, however, the Outlook Rules Wizard needs to be reminded by hand the destinations for the messages I want filtered into various folders.)

I pay $50/year to have my Quicken files (and other files, up to a 50MB limit) backed up on some Web server somewhere. I’ve never had to restore from there before, but I did last night, and it really really worked.

Just a few days ago, I downloaded the 30-day trial of v-com’s AutoSave. It supposedly updates your archive every time you save a file. I’ve found it to be a really annoying piece of software to use — the type of UI that has you saying “Green … blue … green … blue” like Bruce Willis trying to figure out which wire of a homemade bomb to clip. I thought I had saved 7GB of compressed info onto my backup disk, but I couldn’t figure out how to to tell it that that file had changed positions (because in the re-install, drive C became drive F and drive E became drive C and drives D and E had a threeway with a floppy from Encino). Anyway, it turns out that AutoSave wrote uncompressed files that I could restore just by dragging and dropping. Cool error!

I remembered to backup my backup scripts and my password list.

Ah, the sweet benefits of being obsessive-compulsive!

However, all is not sweetness and fresh clover honey here in the Weinberger manse:

I didn’t save my games’ saved games. (No, that isn’t gibberish.) Particularly painful will be getting back to puzzle #50 or so in The Incredible Machine, a game I’ve been playing with my son.

I have done a pisspoor job of maintaining Outlook. Even with frequent auto-archiving, the files get too frigging big. I’m sure it was a coincidence, but my disk blew yesterday while compacting my main .pst fie.

I do a piss poor job of offloading truly irreplaceable files such as family photos.

Some files seem like they’re more trouble to back up than to restore, particularly music files. But I was wrong. Facing re-ripping bunches of CDs does not fill me with joy.

I need to write myself better notes. I lose incredible amounts of time trying to remember if Dreamweaver 4 was on a floppy or was a download and I know it’s going to take me way longer than it should to get back to HP’s CD burning software because I don’t remember how.

So, I’ll spend the rest of the day sanding off the rough edges and discovering several holes I’ve punched into the past couple of years. For example, I just found out that the complex Outlook macros I’d written (oh, get off my case, they do what I need done) are gone. Does this rebuilding time count towards the 4,000 hours of volunteer time Bush wants me to put in?

(Volunteerism: What rich people urge the rest of us do because they figure if we don’t have money, we must have a lot of time.)

A word of praise: After 15 years, we as a civilization have conquered the two problems that drove every PC user to the nearest absinthe bottle: You don’t have to spend a full day getting your computer to recognize your CD drive, and XP finds and installs networking software as if computers were meant to talk with one another.

However, the lack of an XP boot disk is maddening. Just take me to the goddamn command line, you motherfuckers! And don’t whine to me about there not being any DOS any more or about how the recovery console does the same thing. I couldn’t use the recovery console because it couldn’t find an installation of XP on my freaking hard drive.

Aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrgggggggghhhhhhhhh! (sp)

Categories: Uncategorized dw