Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Recovery

Recovering from a computer failure is painful. Really, really painful.

Thankfully, my hard drive didn't crash; every single byte on it (with the exception of the all-important Windows registry) was recoverable. But I was left with the task of restoring it myself from an archived copy, from a tool called Norton Ghost Explorer. NGE takes approximately 20 minutes on startup to read the image of my hard drive, after which it takes approximately 30 seconds to lock up if I make the mistake of choosing more than a single file or directory at a time to restore. It took me three days to figure out how to use the thing without crashing the program (and incurring another 20-minute startup delay). Finally, though, I think I'm done.

Oh, but wait. I'm not done. Because restoring installed program files isn't the same as restoring installed programs. They're not in the registry! They don't have environment variables set! I have to install them again! This isn't a problem, really, for the Java stuff that doesn't use the registry anyway; a big fat hairy complex beast like Oracle JDeveloper 10 runs directly from its restored folder without hassle or setup. And of course, Perl is happy with an environment variable for the web proxy and a mapping of the .pl extension to the interpreter.

No, it's the Windows-native stuff that's a nightmare. Want to install SharpReader? Sorry, you need to install .NET framework 1.1 first. Want to install and run PVCS Tracker? Sorry, you'll need to install SQL Server Client Connectivity Tools first.

And even where it should be fairly straightforward, there's the problem of not having licenses -- not even for stuff that I did have licenses for. If DSG says I don't have a license for, say, SQL Server Client Connectivity Tools, then I can't install it; I have to wait for somebody to get around to adding me to a group that has access to it. Same for Visio, and UltraEdit, and WS_FTP. And that somebody is in no particular rush.

Have you ever tried to read a 50 megabyte XML file using Notepad? Don't.

posted by MeanMrMustard @ 3:11 PM