Last night I was testing my desktop for current drivers and noticed an Intel update for my hard drives. I started the update process, waded through warning after warning that I better know what I was doing (I didn’t :-) and halfway through, everything stopped cold… Uh oh! Rebooting didn’t work, my computer was dead.
On 1/31/14 I bought some backup software from Macrium, setup a daily incremental backup with a full backup every Wednesday, and it’s been cloning a disk image over to my Western Digital 4TB USB 3.0 drive flawlessly for a year and a half, and now I need it.
I scared the crap out of Piper as CD’s were flying off my bookcase as I calmly looked for the Macrium Rescue CD I had initially created. I finally found it, inserted and rebooted. As it was loading I’m thinking all I have to do is select the most recent incremental image file from my WD drive on F: and let it do it’s thing.
The knot in my stomach did a backflip when I didn’t see my F: drive in the drive list. There was a message that USB 3.0 was not supported and I had to recreate my rescue CD with 3.0 drivers. Sure, if I had a working computer to do that little chore!
Then, the solution struck me! I pulled the WD cable out of the USB 3.0 port and plugged it into one of my powered USB 2.0 ports on the front of my box, and rebooted the CD. Sure enough, there she was, and I restored my system successfully. It was slower than it should have been, trudging along on 2.0, but hey.
Bottom line: great backup software and a dedicated backup device sitting on my desk, saved my ass! btw: I just upgraded to Macrium 6.0 and the new rescue disk supports USB 3.0 :-)