One morning at work I had happen a computer user's worst fear. Trying to boot I got a "no boot device" error. What this means is that my computer's hard drive had become corrupted and could no longer be read. My computer had two drives configured as a RAID 0 that means that parts of each file was written across two drives to make reading and writing faster. In checking the physical drives the RAID controller reported one as being off-line with errors. So, even though only one of my drives was bad, because the data was spread across two drives I would be unable to boot.
I quickly bought a new single drive as a replacement. Tossed it in and turned to my backups. I had my system set to automatically backup - this is the only way that it will happen on a regular basis. I have been using NovaStor backup because it allowed me to specify exactly what I wanted backuped and from where. (The backup software that comes with Vista allows on to specify what but not from where so I was never really sure what it contained.)
My first discovery was that the drive had failed during the most recent backup. And, because I had not paid enough attention to the process, each backup deleted the previous one before it ran.
Next I tried too recover from a 4 month old image backup of the system (this one created by Vista's backup tool). That got me part of the way there recreating the files as they were 4 months previously. To make up for the difference I went to the aborted backup and was able to restore all of my documents directory from the previous work day.
At this point all was good except that my offline outlook files had not been backedup before the disk failure and all I had were 4 month old copies. Now I store all of my messages in these files so to loose them was to loose 4 months of activity - something that would be a real problem for me. To get those I needed to get back into the old disks.
So we put the bad drive into another computer and fired up our copy of
SpinRite. This software can do remarkable things with failed hard drives. It worked on the bad drive for 317 hours identifying numerous unreparable sections.
After SpinRite was finished I pulled the new drive, reinstalled the two previous drives and rebooted. After some machinations Vista started and I moved the two needed outlook files to an external drive. Thank you SpinRite!
I reinstalled the new drive copied the outlook files and was back in business with no missing data. I have since modified my backup procedures to keep multiple generations of my file backups and decided to start doing a full image each month. Hopefully, with this approach I will not need to go through this painful process again.