Tales from my latest hard drive crash. Oh well.

A week ago my laptop's hard drive finished his life with a bang. Actually, a couple of bangs and sounds of scratches every time I powered it on. Not my favorite way to start the week, but at least I knew that I've prepared myself just for this moment. Or so I thought. Nothing like a false sense of security to start a joyful week :)

This hard drive contained some data that is very important to me. Two very important projects I was working on. A seminar I was working on for my studies. And all the tools I needed for my regular day to day work. Not to mention lots of purchased music, priceless photos, and the usual shabang.

The good news:
1. Much of my data is saved on the web anyway (GMail, RememberTheMilk, 30Boxes, and many others online services). Phew. At least this stuff was safe.
2. I have extended the warranty for my laptop, so this should have been cheap.
3. I've used Mozy to backup all the important data online, so I was pretty much sure it'd be OK. I had a small concern about the encryption keys, but I was pretty much sure I backed it up enough times in enough places. So it should have been OK.
4. My computer was very sluggish recently, and it really needed a re installation of everything. This whole thing was a kind of a blessing after all :).

The saga begin:
Replacing a hard drive should take 5 minutes. I've seen it done many times before with warranties, and I had a good relationship with the store. So what could go wrong? Well, apparently Lilach didn't see this eye to eye with me. There was a fine print on the warranty that I bought: it might take up to 5 business days to fix any problem. What??? 5 Days. Not 5 minutes? 5 Business Days. "But if you nag us then we'll do it a bit faster :)". Crap. Now I have to spend even more time on the phone with you? What about the days of work I loose because I have no computer??
2 days, 2 hours of traffic, and 5 phone calls later - I had my computer back, with a shiny new hard drive and Windows XP in it. Fun :)
Conclusion: a crucial part of the warranty / insurance is how fast, and where the service is done. Oh well.

Regarding Mozy, I knew it would take me a couple of hours to d/l my 11GB of backup and to decrypt it. A night should have been enough for this in our office's internet and 1.3MB/Second download rate. Hmmmm... Well...
1. I didn't take into account that it takes a couple of hours for Mozy to restore the files on their servers (from the tapes?).
2. I left the computer overnight to d/l the files, only to find it in the morning shutdown (by Vista's power saving options) - with 3% of the files downloaded. Another couple of hours lost.

What about the data? Well. Apparently, Mozy requires more attention then I gave it when I configured it:
1. It didn't backup anything in the 13 days before the crash. So I lost a weekend's work on my seminar. This is in addition to the 4 hours of work that I didn't post to our SVN at work. Another 16 hours of work that were lost.
2. Apparently, I didn't configure it to back up some important hidden and configuration files along with the data that it did back up. So, another 5 hours of configuration were lost.
Conclusion: invest the time to properly configure the data backup. It saves hours of work down the road. 21 hours in my case.

Regarding the re installation, well, there was no way to save this time anyway. Now, that almost everything works properly, it's time to buy that external hard drive to do weekly snapshots of my disk (and maybe save me some re installation time in the future).

All in all, nobody died from this crash, just a couple of documents and ~3 days of work.

We used to say in the army that your code looks nicer when you write it the second time. Well, it does. ;) My backups will sure function better on the next crash.

To everybody that suffered from my a-bit-higher-than-usual-stress-levels this week - please accept my apologies :).