So, it was officially annouced yesterday. Email will not exist much longer as we have seen it for the last 25 years, or so... One of the big players (doesn't really matter who) in the market said that their offering will integrate social networking into their collaboration suite, and that will revolutionize everything in collaboration - already during 2010. 

Nokia announced their new mobile model designed for social networking (while Apple has been there for years now), and they announced also new mini laptop, followed by Samsung.

I guess it its time to really start getting the brain around being social - or just continue reading the news in the papers...

Two weeks ago it happened to me again. Without any warning beforehand, while I was reading my morning emails, my laptop suddenly started logging off and shut down. Trying to restart the machine the startup halted with a message saying that file windows/system32/config/system was missing or corrupted!

No panic, I thought, I could probably locate the file and copy it to another location and cure the corruption with my fine set of Rescue and Recovery Tools from Lenovo. Trying to access the file through these Advanced tools I got an error saying Device Error - oops! So, it seems I have faulty disk. Did run the disk test and great three of six test failed, so this was really getting serious. Contacted Lenovo support, and they sent me a new empty hard drive on next day UPS.

Well, what now? Where's my data? All important business data had been synchronized to server the day before, but all my recent photos and music have not been backed up for several months. Luckily the Lenovo Toolset also had file rescue capability, so I quickly copied everything in Documents and Setting to an external USB-drive. Fine, now I only needed to recover my system and applications.

There the problem really kicked in: kept getting the device error, which interrupted copying. Did not know how many of my system files were corrupted; maybe it was just one or there were several. Anyway, my system could not be rescued. The last system backup was at least six months ago, and it definately did not have many of my latest applications or system updates. Seemingly my only option was to start from scratch by reinstalling everything from my Lenovo Recovery Disks, which were only a year old.

The installation took me two days with all the updates to system and applications (incl. 54 security updates for Windows only). All my application settings were gone, so it took me several day to reset the options for at least close to those were before. All my history was gone with cookies and stuff. Still, I am tuning my laptop to its original state, but probably will never be the same (for better or worse).

At the time of this writing I am taking full backup of my system. There are many questions about my backup strategy, but promised myself to do this at least once a month.

Will I ever be able to use this backup? What if I change my laptop model? I don't know and I don't care - just get on with the backup, moron!