My new (albeit refurbished I'm sure) hard drive from Dell failed on Sunday. By "new" I mean "less than six months old". By "failed" I mean...well, I don't know what I mean. It was strange. CHKDSK would find problems and fix them. I would boot normally and authenticate without a problem. However, if I tried writing to the disk (such as installing software or copying files) it would crash. How did I determine this? I thought I'd fixed it BUT I ran defrag...WOW! It was NOT HAPPY with that.
Once again, backups saved me. I bought a new hard drive and those good folks tried to ghost the existing drive but there were simply too many errors with it. So about 6:30 PM Monday I started building the system on the new drive. I installed the OS, Office, et. al., SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008. I got some sleep about 1:00 AM this morning and woke around 6:00 to finish.
I defragged while showering (yes, I am that flexible) and then, once finished, started the restoration. It was really neat to watch all of my files and folders come back, as if by magic. I cannot emphasize enough how relieved I am that I have a good backup avaialble. In fact, I realized that something may be wrong and performed a full backup on Sunday before getting into everything.
So what did I lose? Almost nothing. I write "almost" because all in all I will be out about 24-30 hours. That includes time to reinstall everything, restore from the backup, and reconfigure everything. As such, I have a new disaster recovery plan.
New Plan - The place where I bought the new drive will ghost a drive for a nominal fee. Considering my bill rate, the amount of time I spend rebuilding a system, etc. etc., I am thinking that I will buy another drive, have the "working" drive ghosted to that drive occasionally. I figure once a month at most will be sufficient.
My thinking is that if the data is on a backup and the installations are on a ghost, my down time can be reduced to a few hours, not a few days. Also, it's cheaper than having two machines with one machine doing nothing. And, it's lighter to carry!