DotNetNuke tutorials, tips and tricks

Saturday, September 17, 2005

A Lesson in Backing up

I had an interesting day on Friday, I was running slightly behind on the DotNetNuke tutorials and reviews, because they were each taking a day longer than I planned. 11:30am arrived and bang everything went wrong.

An email arrived which I knew was junk mail, I tried to press delete but somehow accidentally opened it. Bang – in a second I had installed a virus to my laptop.

Norton Antivirus couldn’t delete it and after a few attempts I was stuck.

I use Norton Ghost and most days I create a backup of my entire laptop onto an external Lacie 250GB drive. (But I had let it slip and the backup was 2 weeks out of date)

Ok, lets try to put the last working version of the OS back on the laptop – I have several partitions, so this shouldn’t be a problem just to reload the windows section.

So, this is the first time I have attempted this, and I have to say I was very nervous! – I went through the procedure and it spent a while wiping the drive & re-installing my backup – until it reaches the end when it is verifying the disk and says there is a problem and freezes.

By this point I am almost having a heart attack – ok, I restart, windows begins to load and then goes black and that’s it….

I have 2 partitions of windows installed, so I try to load up the other version which should be ok, it does exactly the same and goes to a black screen…

Oh – Has it just wiped absolutely everything?

I am now almost vomiting, this laptop has so many projects on its untrue, I was starting to feel as though I had lost a lifetime worth of work. – What was I going to do? I’ve got the DNN Creative Magazine next issue to complete and all my work has been erased?!

Luckily the second version of windows I didn’t really care about, so I just re-installed windows onto that partition, once I had got a working copy of windows on this partition, the other partition with all of the important data started working again just like magic.

Phew, I’ve just got to catch up on a couple of bits and I’m up and running again. – This little problem ended up taking 2 days to fix, for what should have been a simple 5 min reload from a backup.

And all because of one tiny little email. I’m running a firewall, Antivirus, Spyware all with the latest updates and the little cutie virus still got in – you’ve got to love them.

Whats todays lesson? – Create a DAILY backup, create a DAILY backup, create a DAILY backup, repeat after me . . . .

Oh yes and – Copy that backup to another drive incase the backup becomes corrupt!

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