I write about computers for a living. I get paid to write about the inner workings of operating systems such as Windows Vista. I have been doing this for over a decade now, but no amount of experience can prepare you for a mess-up that’s partly caused by the operating system. I know a bad workman always blames his tools but what happened this morning should be a lesson to everyone – this is why I am writing this up. Keywords are: windows vista backup and restore overwriting partition.
Anyway, with the GoogleFluffTM out of the way, what happened to me is a tragedy. I keep backups. I have a backup of all my photos and my MP3 files from CDs I’ve bought. I have a backup of all my creative stuff. I have two external drives totally 500Gb for this. I also keep a second drive inside my computer and have a backup of all the song mixes I am working on – and once I have finished a CD these backups are moved to the external. So I have three backups at work. I also have my operating system backed up in case of emergencies.
Such an emergency happened the other day. For some unknown reason, my PC took over half an hour to start up and then was refusing to boot up at all. So I decided to restore my backup of my PC. I have done this before with a fresh drive, etc., so I backed up my email onto my internal hard drive and moved all my master tracks onto that drive too. I did the restore and was horrified when Vista had taken itself to wipe my D: drive.
You see, when you do a snapshot of your system for a backup, it takes a snapshot of the actual state of your PC at the time. When I did my initial backup, my D: was empty and my C: was partitioned different. Despite backing up my system subsequently, the state of my D: drive and C: drive partitions were not backed up. So when I did the restore – kaput! All those partitions were wiped without my consent. Thanks Microsoft for making this clear in your instructions.
While I am pissed off about this, I do have various final mixes of tracks stored all over the place, but I have lost a number of files. I am currently running an undelete application in order to retrieve whatever data I can. Let this be a warning to those of you thinking of using Vista Backup and Restore. A system restore will cause your PC to revert to the condition it was when you initially backed it up.

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