Close Shave with Digital Amnesia!

So I was updating my drive with a solid state drive... Did I unplug my old data drive? Did I take care not to delete any partitions before I knew my new one was in place? Did I loose all the comics I've been working on for the last 5 years?

No,
No,
Yes!

Yes, I blasted the partition on the old drive and not the new drive and almost lost all my Dragonaur comics in the last 5 years. Note: I had properly archived the years previous and so they were safe! Fortunately I found a tool called Partition Wizard that could recover a partition! Saved! But that was a close one.

Lessons to remember?

1) Microsoft's Home Server sux and it's so called backup of my drive gave me back three precisely empty files! Oh yes, very impressive display.

2 ) The best back up is a back up that you can see. Just make a copy of the files! I don't know how many backups have gotten garbled and useless for me over the years. Duplicity is your friend.

3 ) Don't mess with your original drive until you've copied it's contents or really don't need it's contents! Keep it safe. Power it down until you're ready to look at it.

BUT now that all that evil is over, my new drive is a fire breathing dragon of incredibleness! I use it for my swap files and system files and it flies! All my normal data goes on my old drive. But backed up to my server periodically. By hand! I mean really, you should have two drives anyway. But having one be a solid state drive is just an incredible thing. I can boot from shut off in the same time that my system used to come up from sleep mode! Is that killer or what?

Plus, I added a new case fan because the old one was bolted on the side like a Frankenstein because it was actually too big for the case!

I was thinking of getting a new Core i5 processor MoBo, but this will keep my quad core Phenom system a contender for a few more years. I mean really, solid state drives are the future. Hopefully the'll just integrate them into the system via PCI-2 or something instead of slower SATA. That would just be killer!

So this weekend almost was a total bummer but turned out totally fantastic! My ride may be a beater, but my computer is a tuned sports car! >_<