I had the unfortunate luck late last week to contract a really terrible trojan/virus on my work computer called Vundo. Ok, I admit, I should never have clicked on the email my father sent, but I had a moment of stupid, and boy did I pay for it.
But this post isn’t actually about the hours of attempting to clean the infection, or the fact that it buried itself in the master boot record and would reinstall at every reboot, or even that it prevents both booting into Safe Mode AND the installation of all common spyware removal tools. Even though I have a LOT to say about all that.
This post is about how cool it is to be able to do a complete reinstall of a computer these days and not worry about my data. I had all of my critical documents in Dropbox, and they were all synced to the cloud and to my other computers. My place of work uses Outlook and Microsoft Exchange, so all of my calendars and emails were backed up on the server (and even if they weren’t, I sync Outlook to Google Calendar so I wouldn’t have lost anything there). Xmarks, the Firefox add on that syncs my bookmarks and my saved passwords, restored pretty much everything I need quickly on Firefox, and Delicious has all my important bookmarks anyway. Most of my active documents are in Google Docs, and I back them up every week or so to Dropbox.
This all means that I was able to low-level format my hard drive, install Windows 7, and have a pretty functional system with all my important data in just an hour or so. Operating system, install Firefox, install Dropbox, install Outlook….more or less done. Not only that, but I know that no matter what happens, even down to the loss of my main machine, I can restore and keep working quickly and easily.
