I know I have blogged about this before, but I have to again as having a good backup saved me and could save you too
So, the other day I noticed that I needed to update Windows on my work PC. So as usual, I installed them and waited to reboot as I had some projects going on. Once my projects were complete, I rebooted. That’s where the trouble begins. No matter what I did, I could not boot back into Windows, I tried everything I could, looked online for things I may not have tried, made changes to this, to that, run commands in a recovery mode, nothing would work. So as a last resort, I used my last backup from the day before, to restore my system from bare metal.
I am using a Cloud/local backup product from Solarwinds. It is kind of a “set it and forget it” program, although there is not much to do once it is setup, it is still a good idea to check on the status of your backup. Knowing I had a good backup, I started the restore utility and started downloading my backup from the previous day. It did take some time being it was downloading some 400GB+ of data (If I was using an external drive it would have been faster), but when I came into the office Monday morning, the restore operation was complete. I removed the recovery disk and rebooted. Next thing I know, my PC is backup and running. It was very easy, everything worked as before and with the exception of a couple of emails, all my data was there too.
The nice thing about Solarwinds backup is that it can be both local and cloud-based at the same time. As mentioned before, If I had a local external hard drive, the amount of time it would have taken would probably be a third of what it did take, but with the ease of the whole process, I cannot complain. Besides doing a full restore as I did, there is also an option for just restoring 1 file or a whole folder if necessary. The backup can even backup SQL databases (perfect for CPSQL customers).
So, if you are not currently backing up your system to the cloud or otherwise, please look into getting this setup. CCS can get you setup, have a status email sent you daily and help you any way we can.
-Bryan