Looking at synchronization and one scary tool

It is funny how things work out, a disaster can lead to opportunities. Last month my main pc at home somehow got a corrupt hard drive and at first I thought I had lost all my private data (family pictures, documents etc), the drive wasn’t backed up as it was a mirrored drive, which I had thought would be an alright disaster recovery mechanism. It happened while I was upgrading to Server 2008. I broke the mirror and disconnected them. So the drives themselves weren’t connected at the time of upgrade, it was when I reconnected them after the upgrade was successful, the OS just couldn’t see them, maybe a corrupt partition table. I even rolled back to Server 2003, but nothing. The most important thing was that I had to recover that data somehow. This lead me to a piece of software called Active File Recovery which is just so simple to use. To cut a long story short I managed to recover all my missing data. But one thing that really made me think was the fact that this software could see my data and all previous owners data (it was a 2nd hand drive bought from a computer fair).

I have learnt several things from this experience, these being:-

• I need to use a more reliable medium. Using new hard drives instead of 2nd hand ones may have prevented this issue, but at the time (2002) I made the purchase there wasn’t a lot of data and it was the only viable option.
  
• I need a disaster recovery plan. Yes even for your home pc. I chose not to use a backup tool for my data for the simple fact that as there was around 13000 files, it would have took too long to run a back up on a machine which wasn’t permanently powered up.
  
• Be aware of old data. If upgrading an old hard drive, keep in mind that the data may still be recoverable. Dispose with care.

Now I have my data back I needed to find a mechanism which would protect my data with the least amount of administration work. That is I don’t want to have to remember to run a back up every time I add a file to my important documents drive. This is what has lead me to the Synchronization Framework. Using an expanded on version of the file synchronization example I now have a mechanism which will synchronize my important docs with my NAS, running in the background as a service. I can sleep better at night now, but what if we have a flood or worse? All my data is still in the same location. My next personal project is to also get it to synchronize with the cloud; hello Live Mesh.