Recovering from hardware failure

[Owl]

There have been a couple of threads recently where the "victim" appears to be suffering a hardware failure.

I had my notebook workhorse go belly up a while back, and you can spend a lot of time fiddling about (and potentially losing data while you do) trying to ressurect what might turn out to be a lost cause. Needless to say neither did I have adequate backups.

As time was in a shorter supply than money, I bit the bullet and bought a new notebook (£400), and thereby instantly gave myself an upgraded CPU, RAM, hard drive, and Win7 (brilliant). The only downside was the time spent clearing out all the dross that comes with a new PC and putting all my apps into it (many of which didn't like Win7).

Even without all the fiddling about, it gave me the chance to hook up the drive from the dead PC onto a USB port (using one of these, available cheaper if you look around) and read in whatever was urgent. Fortunately it was the PC itself and not the hard drive that had failed. A year later the dead PC is still sitting waiting for me to see if I can get it going again, but time does not permit.

In those days I was not running RBRx, and the recent posts have given me pause for thought.

If I had been running RBRx, then when I hooked up the drive externally I imagine the file system for the current snapshot would have been accessible but nothing else. In order to access data from other snapshots, one would either have to piece it back together from raw disc sectors, or have knowledge of the RBRx database to know where to look. Fitting the drive into the new PC, or finding a way to boot the old drive across USB (not impossible) would fire up RBRx, but the OS probably wouldn't run because it would have the wrong drivers (possibly it would run in safe mode).

Suppose the hard drive has gone flakey and the boot process stalls. You fiddle about a bit, try to roll back to an old snapshot, RBRx tries to update the file allocation table and fails half way through. Then you don't even have an intact FAT to help access the drive when you hook it up to another machine.

All this confirms my existing attitude to RBRx: Use it to protect the OS and installed apps, but keep user data on a different partition. That way, if disaster strikes and you need to access the disc to recover your data, you have a better chance of success.

And.... KEEP GOOD BACKUPS!

[Dagrev]

Very wise advice. No one method is fool-proof (or hardware-proof, as the case may be). In addition to RB I do an Acronis image about once a week. On top of that I use SugarSync (free) for individual files (docs, downloads, etc) to automatically download the most current version if I have to rollback or restore from an image.

Better safe than sorry.