Backup Your Vista!

I'm a near bleeding edge person, technology speaking. I don't want to jump into every technology as soon as it comes out, but when something is past a raw version 1 and has reached a state where it looks like it will be reasonably popular, I feel that I have an obligation to jump in. I'm a coach and trainer and I think that I have a responsibility to my clients to keep my experience and exposure to technology as wide as possible.

I built a 64 bit XP box almost three years ago and struggled to make it do all the things I do with a PC. Only in the last month or so has that become a reality.

I have been running Vista on my laptop for almost a year. It was a rocky start, but I have grown to actually like it. There are still some things that annoy me, but in balance it is a good thing.

Then I had a hardware problem on one of my desktop machines. I was running a SATA RAID-5 drive system using the motherboard hardware and driver. It had a nasty habit of dropping one of the drives out of the array. I never did figure out if it was the drives, the controller or the driver. I would just have the vendor supplied Windows configuration utility rebuild the array. No big deal, that's what RAID-5 is supposed to be about, right?

The real problem came when virtually simultaneously an automatic Windows update requiring a reboot happened at the same time as one of these RAID problems. Vista has a robust recovery system that enables you to roll back changes that broke your system. However, because I had a hardware problem at about the same time or for some other reason (possibly user error), none of the available restore points would load and fix the problem. I was really stuck. The drives ran, but Windows would not boot properly due to a problem caused by the update of the video driver that left the system with only a black screen and mouse pointer, even in Safe Mode!

My only option was to install another drive, reinstall an OS and save my data from the drives. What a pain.

So here is my recommendation for all of you who depend on Vista. Get an external USB drive at least twice the size of your boot partition and use the Vista Backup and Restore Center to completely back up your system on a regular basis. This utility will create a backup that the Vista install can use to restore your system when an event like this hits you. It is easy and quick. My 250 gig boot partition takes about 10 minutes.

The investment in $100-$200 might save you days of frustration and loss of data!