Time for the Big R+R

19:29.40 - Friday 1st September 2006   (Link to This Entry)

That would be the big Reformat and Reinstall - time to scrub the HD clean and reinstall everything to make it more efficient, safer and anything else I can think of.

You know how it goes: You start off with a machine that's pretty lean and mean and eventually things just pile up, like dust in the corners of a room, and your machine is slowing down with all the new registry entries that breed deep down in between the DAT files. Eventually you want to scrub the whole thing and start again. That's the point I'm at now.

Currently I have 2 x 120GB SATA drives in RAID config for speed and accessibility, and this week I purchased a 250GB IDE Western Digital Caviar HD - £55 delivered from here - for backing up to, using a removable bay to make it easier.

The idea is to create a 200GB encrypted virtual drive using TrueCrypt and have all my work in there, plus tweak programs like Outlook so it saves its PST files in there, IE/NS/FF Browser shortcuts and so on. Then, once a week, I'll copy the entire 200GB file to the new drive and stick it back in the safe, which is pretty much where it'll live for the rest of the week.

I haven't decided how I'll perform the copy - might just be drag & drop, might be using a script, or maybe even SyncBack, who knows? I may even fire up VB6 and write something, or at least get BootBlock to do it.

And if I don't update for a while, you know something's gone horribly wrong.