My Laptop Died, Now What?

Posted on February 11, 2011 by: Justin Scott 0 Comments

I was just wrapping up some pretty important work this morning (moving a website from one server to another) when my laptop suddenly died on me.  A chat with Dell tech support indicates that the motherboard has gone bad, so it will be out of service for the next few days while replacement parts get shipped to the tech who will be repairing it for me.  What now?

First step, don't panic!  We have another laptop in the house which I'm using right now.  It's not as powerful and doesn't have any of my tools installed, but it'll get me through the weekend.  I'm in the process of installing all of my off-the-shelf software now to at least get some functionality back.  I'm also having to pull some installers from backups or other storage locations for tools which aren't readily available online.

One good thing about this experience is that it's showing me where some weaknesses are.  For one, I use Carbonite to back up important stuff in real time.  I'm quickly finding that the problem with Carbonite is that it tends to exclude a lot of files even in folders that you told it to back up.  For example, I have an "install" folder which contains installers for important programs.  I told Carbonite to back that up.  Unfortunately, it's excluded all executable files from the backup, so pretty much nothing in that folder is actually available to recover through their web interface on this laptop.  I could really use that folder right now.  When my main laptop is back in action that is one of the first things which is getting changed.  It will either back up ALL of my files in the folders I specify or I'll find another solution.  It did have copies of some Word documents that I need, so that came in handy.

Next, I do have a full system backup on an external disk that is less than a week old, so my data is safe locally anyway.  Unfortunately, our other laptop has Windows Vista Home edition which isn't playing well with the Windows 7 backup files on my external drive, so pulling data from there seems to be a non-starter as well.  Granted, that particular backup is designed to be restored on to the same computer and hardware that it came from, but it would be nice to pull a few files off there.

The star of the show today seems to be Dropbox.  I installed it on the other laptop, gave it my credentials, and it immediately set about downloading the dropbox contents to this computer.  Everything appears exactly as it did on the other laptop.  Kudos to the Dropbox team!