It’s been a day. Like I had just posted, my computer’s main drive went south and I had to do a rebuild. There was a time that I used to do this almost for fun. like if your computer was running slow, you’d just wipe it and start over. But that was before having terabytes of data and dozens of applications and hundreds of online accounts that all need to be handled.
I had gone to lunch and just when I was pulling back into the house, the Amazon driver was stopping in my front yard with my new drive. Great timing. While I wanted to do something else with my early afternoon – a casa de chostic worthy post of adding gutter guards – they didn’t work out so well, so I had the day to devote to system restore.
After blowing the dust out of the desktop and installing the new SSD drive, it was off to the races, on crutches. I wanted to have as clean of an install as possible to avoid any bloated pieces, but unfortunately, that also leads to broken dependencies. And I’ve been out of the system building game for too long to understand what’s what in Windows anymore.
So I removed everything I thought I could. Applied all the patches that were available to me, then began the the dual process of installing applications and rebuilding my RAID mirror. After getting KeePass and Outlook installed, I was able to breathe a little easier. The bigger headache was setting up Plex again. I had backed up my old database before wiping, but I don’t think it’s going to be any easier to restore it than it would be to just rescan everything. Once I saw my new install created a duplicate server instance in my dashboard, I didn’t want to head down that path any further.
So after about 6 hrs., by RAID is about 50% built and I have most of my daily-functional apps installed: Outlook, Vivaldi, Money, KeePass. And a couple other ones, Open Live Writer (present), 7Zip, Faststone, Image Resizer, CDWinEmu. The others can wait until their needed, like Visual Studio. Because that’s going to bring with it setting up Hyper-V for my TFS server instance. Oh hmmm. I might have blown away my local SQL server and who knows what in-progress database I might have had on it. Oh well. Maybe someday, I’ll need them and I’ll find some way to read a NVME SSD externally.
But back to the point of this post, I am exhausted, and I didn’t even do anything strenuous today other than climb on the roof for about 10 minutes. Just the mental tediousness of restoring and configuring a system for the hundredth time in your life is draining. But what’s the alternative? I’ve never been trusting of system restores, only data restores. It’s the path I’ve chosen to take. And I guess it’s probably going to continue every 3 yrs or so.
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