Today ended up being a surprisingly urgent operating system reinstall day. I had hit a point where my system decided it'd be pretty cool to just go tits up whenever I wanted to launch a game that's more intense than Gems of War, and then give me plenty of shit on restarting.
I have had enough of that. I happened to have a couple of drives laying around -- one SSD, and one platter based drive.
I've got my reinstall of Windows done, and I'm pulling my relatively desired files off the old drive now.
This could have ended up much, much worse:
The old drive was originally a backup drive that got shoehorned in to running main storage service when I had two hard drives go within a week of each other, several years ago. I had purchased the SSD and HDD in 2015 and 2016 (geez) to eventually get the OS onto fancy technology and resume my backups, but let's be honest: I hate doing it. It's work. A lot of work. Work I don't wanna do. A few years back, I had started making more use of online storage services like Dropbox, Box, and more recently, pCloud (of which two of these have referral links; signing up grants me and you a bit of extra storage space). I use these for small files that could get lost on large disks, or get changed often enough that some type of automation would do me well to avoid a huge loss of work.
This move has saved a bunch of work for me: I have various projects stored in at least two of the forenamed services, so I can retrieve files like the work I was doing to ePubify Partners, and restore work that I was doing on various images, plus I've got a bunch of PDFs from Atomic Zombie, who offer limited downloads of their guides to building your own bicycles.
So, my reinstall window looked like this: * Remove old, problematic hard drives. * Install fancy new drive and another platter based drive. * Boot to USB and install Windows 10 Pro (realizing that the USB drive has images for several versions of Win10, which I might clean up later). * Install video drivers, since that was the only thing that Windows 10 seemed to need me to install for myself, driver-wise. * Install all Windows Updates, barring the Creator's update.
That all took about an hour, mainly because I had to go find a damn screwdriver.
Then the fun stuff starts!
Old hard drive's in and connected along with the new ones. I get to now migrate somewhere close to a terabyte of data.
I've got FastCopy running to move 150-ish GB right now. It'll take quite a while, because it's a metric fucktonne of images that'll be coming across, but that's okay. That'll be done overnight; and throughout the week, I'll see to the Steam games, getting them migrated over, locating the save files for Cities: Skylines (which I will actually NOT be heartbroken over if I don't migrate the saves -- I'll miss Groddle Shores, but that just moves me a step closer to the mid-May release of the Mass Transit DLC), and perhaps giving a few games a new try, now that the hard drive's been replaced with something that's not flagging up as OLD_AGE when checking the drive's status in SMART.
The important takeaway from this is the following: Backups of important files aren't just a nice thought. You should back up your important files now. Not later, but as quickly as you feasibly can. Online storage, for what it's worth, can be worth its weight in salt, especially if it lets you recover a file you thought was gone. Have multiple backups for the extra important files. If you only have one backup of an extra important file... That File Was NOT Important ENOUGH.
