Digital Pack Rat

Which is why we have hard drives measured in terabytes now.

I got off the dime yesterday last night and turned up the new desktop which, predictably, did not go off without a hitch.  The first issue?  My backup software... Norton Save & Restore... doesn't run on Win7, it runs on XP and Vista.  Only.  I could read the handwriting on THAT wall, yet I still contacted Norton's support center in Bangalore for an interesting yet time consuming chat.  After a 15 minute wait for "the next available technician" Prajeep informed me he couldn't help (coz he wasn't trained on N-S&R) and transferred me to Rudhpo, who confirmed my suspicions: S&R V2.0 doesn't run on Win7 and is no longer a supported product.  After another half-hour and 55 Yankee Dollars we had Norton Ghost 15 downloaded, installed, and were ready to begin recovering our considerable archives.

Which, one more stroke on the dead horse's back: the software appears to be IDENTICAL to N-S&R v2.0.  Same interface, same colors, same menus, same every-damned-thang, except it runs on Win7. There are no added features that I could see, save its ability to access my checking account, which benefits NORTON but not ME.  I would have told Norton to fuck off but I was a hostage... pay the ransom if you want your data back.  So I did.  But I didn't LIKE it.

We began the file and folder restore process around 2100 hrs and completed it shortly after 0300 hrs this morning... or after about approximately 73,000 files had been restored to the new box.  You have to babysit the restore process to prevent file duplication and also to avoid overwriting existing files on the new box with bad data from your archived image... specifically in the case of "ini" files.  I'm quite certain Win7's ini files are different than Vista's.  We installed other bits and pieces of software whilst babysitting and attempted to get rid of all the crap HP loads on a peesee... stuff you neither want nor will ever use.  Why vendors do that particular trick is beyond me, as well.  But they all do it.  And we digress.

So.  I have a few minor thangs left to do today (Firefox, again? or stay with IE9 which seems to be pretty fast?) before we're done but the majority of the work is complete.  The good news is all those files seem to have made it through to the new box OK and I can continue being a digital pack rat.  We all need stuff like photos of old co-workers from 1998 that we can no longer name, right?  That, and other stuff.