<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by richard:
Backing up is cool but restoring is the object of the game.
Anyone had a disk crash or a lost/stolen/destroyed laptop and had to restore from a backup?
What were your experiences?</font>
Yes, you and NickP have hit the nail on the head. I've worked on far too many testing projects where the restore is a case of "don't worry, the restore instruction will be with you sometime in the next phase". Also, I've witnessed a two week outage where the backups appeared to be working (Arcserve, I think) only for the restore to fail completely. I don't even test a backup until I know I can write a small file to the tape/cd/disk and retrieve it first and this is why I distrust proprietary stuff.
A good low cost USB hard disk (going to much bigger USB2/firewire2 one at some point after I replace my laptop) looks like the order of the day for me, perhaps with a CDRW drive or DVDR drive. Ghosting too seems like a very good alternative to installing XP from scratch so I'm actively looking at that.
As always, it's nice to go to work for the day and come back to all this good advice. Thanks everyone!