House keeping is one of those tasks I used to love to hate a few years ago but an unfortunate necessity with a Microsoft Windows based machine.

Back then backing up wasn’t an easy task, reinstalling everything took almost a day to get up and running and there was always something that was forgotten or missing or just not quite right.

Over the years I have practiced and perfected my technique and with the software available at the moment it is even easier.

What I have -

• NAS (network attached storage) or USB/ Firewire drive
• Disk imaging software such as Norton Ghost
• VPC (Virtual PC) software such as VMWare

I now have basic ‘build’ for each machine I have whether it be my laptop, desktop or development machine as they all have things slightly different. I also make use of VPC‘s for my development machines to make things even easier.

Firstly I make use of a NAS for just about everything, I have a couple of computers so it made sense to put my ‘My Documents’ folder and a few other bits on a NAS so that it could be accessed from where ever I am and which ever machine I was on.

I also use the NAS for backing up other information that gets dumped locally on the PC and for storing disk and VPC images.

When I first installed Windows XP, Vista or Server 2003 with the usual list of software that I use and patched them I took a disk image of it and put it onto the NAS. Now whenever I need to start again from scratch I simply throw the image back on the machine and it is just like new. A few extra patches may need to be applied and sometimes this is sufficient to re-image the machine to save time when I next come to do it.

I also use VMWare for my VPC‘s, now a virtual PC’s hard disk is just a file which mean it can be put anywhere archived off and brought back whenever needed just like a disk image.

VMWare also has the ability to allow you to take a snapshot of the VPC in it’s current state and then with a click of a button take the VPC back to when the snapshot was taken, which is great if I am doing something with a bit more risk.

All in all this all vastly decreases the amount of time I am down. As for my list of essentials that will have to wait for another post.

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