Well actually, my computer went down again for whatever reason. Windows was so corrupted that I couldn't fix it. This actually happened at the end of Vacation Day 1. I was up the entire night and finally took a break yesterday at 5:30 or six when we had dinner.
For times like this, I actually have a hard drive on the shelf with everything already installed and configured on it. So basically all I have to do is pop it in and copy it to my normal work drive. The problem was that it was basically in an unfinished state. It lacked settings and several current applications I use being installed. It also had a problem with Windows Installer 3.1 and Windows update.
After fixing all that, I cloned the drive and setup Acronis Secure Zone. Providing the computer or the actual hard drive is not dead, all I have to do now is press F11 when the computer starts up and I can restore the computer. I did the same thing actually on my laptop at the same time. I needed a little added security for when I'm on the road. One of these days I'm gonna get a larger hard drive for it so my old one will make a good spare to carry with me.
After all that was done, I copied over my data from a copy of my work drive I made prior to doing anything.
Even after all my preparation on the drive I keep on the shelf, I found a few more things that it lacks. I have a running list I keep to log changes I need to make to it at some point. Fortunately, I had already updated a whole slew of things previously, but there were still several things to work out. My current list however is rather small. I missed a couple applications and need to make a couple setting changes.
The time doing this is astronomical. Of course this also exceeds what a manufacturer would do in engineering a recovery system for a product line.
Anyway So much for Vacation Day 2.