This weekend was designated as the weekend to reload my OS on my Dell I8600 laptop. Primary reason is I was a bad-boy and loaded BOTH Beta 1 and Beta 2 of VS2005 directly onto my machine without using Virtual PC. And then I realized I hadn't reloaded it since I got it in September of 2004--- which is a big deal as I tend to need a reload every 6 months!
Right off I knew I was going to have issues with backing up and restoring my data. I have been using a 40G USB 1.1/Firewire drive for backups for quite a while and felt comfortable using the Backup utility that comes with Windows. This past week a client from long ago asked me to look at something and guess what? Yep, couldn't get it off the backup. It was showing up perfectly in the catalog, but it would restore 0 files. While there may be something I'm missing, I was smart enough once upon a time to burn those older files to CD so it was not as disastrous as it could have been.
I spent not too much $ at newegg.com and picked a Venus USB 2.0 drive enclosure and 250GB hard drive. For the same money (about $160US) I could have purchased an all-in-one, but this way I could get a nicer enclosure and the hard drive I wanted. I've had nothing but good experiences with IBM/Hitachi drives, and this enclosure has both a power switch (so I can leave it hooked up, but inactive) and a silent fan. Has worked out well thus far, and I have more space than I know what to do with right now.
Part two was using Acronis True Image. A friend recommended it and he was right on the mark. This is a great app. Not only do you get a free, full features 15-day trial, but its worth the $. You can image your drive without rebooting into a custom DOS app, you can map a share to an image for easy file access, and a whole lot more I've haven't tried yet. Thus far I've baselined two images during the reinstall, one right after all the drivers and updates were installed and another after most of my apps were installed.
What is going to big the big adventure is I'm taking the "least privilege" plunge and will create my main account as a normal user. I'll have a lot to blog about in the coming days!