It's time for the bi-annual operating system refresh for my home office, so I decided to upgrade my laptop from Windows Vista to Windows 7. What I didn't realize was that my backups were on the edge of failure.

Having been in the IT industry for over 20 years, I've been ingrained with more than a sense of trepidation when it comes to in place upgrades. It's just something I don't like to do.

Having only a single hard drive for my laptop, my choice was to either:

• perform an in place upgrade
• wipe the drive and start again

In fact, I chose option 3:

• buy another hard drive and keep the original just in case

I wanted to ensure that I could continue using the laptop in case the upgrade wasn't successful. In addition, I keep all my data on a backup server, and perform regular backups which I test as well. With the backups in place, it was time to proceed with Windows 7.

Despite some initial installation issues, I managed to get Windows 7 installed on my new 500G 2.5" drive. Once the system was in reasonable shape, I decided to start restoring data from the server using a program called Syncback. This allows me to schedule up several restoration jobs in the background and continue working. Initially, the performance was slow and it turned out this was due to the fact I was using wireless. I then changed over to the 100BaseT wired connection and the performance increased dramatically. The problem now is that the server started to crash. I then reverted to manual copying over of directories but had to reset the server as it kept crashing after copying a few gigabytes of data (sometimes less). After a while, I decided enough was enough and took out the data drive and placed it in an external drive enclosure and connected it via USB to my laptop. Well, that was that. The backup drive gave up the ghost and all my backups were gone.

It scares me to think that if I had chosen either of the first two options when installing Windows 7, my data could have been gone. If an in place upgrade had failed, I would have lost the original data as well as the backups and that would have been catastrophic for my small business. In reality, I also keep at least 1 other set of backups, however it is a few months old and there still would have been some pain. As it stands, I have re-installed the drive containing Windows Vista and am backing it up to another drive.

It turns out that my years of IT experience have paid off. In leaving the original drive alone and taking multiple backups, I am still able to restore my data despite the loss of my primary backups. I also had a fallback with the secondary backups.

The lesson learned, however is to keep those secondary backups a little fresher and to maybe keep a set offsite like I used to at my previous employers.

Update: I went out aand bought an external eSata drive enclosure and a 1TB drive. Am backing up to this thing at light speed. It supports 2.5" as well as 3.5" and the drives are pop-out, so offsites will be much easier to create.