The other day the system drive — the one containing Windows and all my programs — died unexpectedly. As in, I didn’t have a backup for it.
Lesson #23,781 learned: never run any solid state drive without a robust backup process. Actually, that’s a revision to lesson #23,103 (“never run a cheap solid state drive without a robust backup process”). Apparently, all solid state drives are both wickedly fast and notoriously unreliable. Compared to dinosaur-like spinning platter drives, at least.
So I got to experience the joys of re-installing everything, including Windows 8, from the ground up.
Actually, it wasn’t all that bad: Win8 installs much faster than previous versions, and my mainstay apps (Microsoft Office and Adobe Master Suite) are sufficiently out-of-date that I didn’t run into any “you’ve already installed our software on another computer!” nonsense. I guess software companies don’t own real computers that, you know, catastrophically fail at unexpected times. Or maybe they all do regular backups.
I also noticed some benefits from doing a clean install: the nifty Win8 power management features now work properly. I can shutdown my system in seconds, and restore it almost as quickly. In fact, I bet if I had a recent “instant on” motherboard the restore would probably be as fast as the shutdown. It’s also nice that it gets restored to exactly where I left off, with the same apps and documents open, although that feature’s been around for awhile.