By Gordon Meyer

P3GizmoGuy@gmail.com

It was just a few weeks ago when I wrote about the ClickFree automated backup system.   Little did I realize that I would soon have to use it to actually restore key data on my hard drive. 

Here’s a bit of advice I failed to follow myself.  It’s a really good idea to wipe off your hard drive every two or three years and do a clean install of both Windows and your applications.  Why?  Because over the years, all sorts of extraneous crap builds up that you don’t even know about and it can slow down your computer to an absolute crawl.

I know better and still didn’t get around to doing that because frankly it’s a cumbersome, time consuming operation.  Re-installing Windows alone takes close to two hours, assuming the install goes smoothly.  But with my computer (and no, I have not yet gotten around to getting that new system I wrote about), all that junk on my drive was not only slowing things down to a snail’s pace, it was actually preventing some of my programs from running properly.

So over the weekend, I broke down and wiped my hard drive.  Fortunately, I also did one more pass with ClickFree before doing my clean install.  The restore process from ClickFree worked very well for me and in the background so I could use my computer for other tasks while the restoration was in progress.

ClickFree lets gives you a choice of either a complete or select restoration.  Since one of the reasons I was doing this operation was to clear out all sorts of no longer needed files, I elected for the latter, choosing mainly to restore the files I had on my desktop itself as well as everything in the My Documents folder. 

Although I expected ClickFree to restore all those files to the appropriate folders on the “new” drive, it put everything in a dedicated folder instead, with the contents of that folder simulating the original file structure of the original hard drive configuration.  I like that.  It’s certainly easy enough to move files over to reconstructed folders if I want them, but truthfully I plan to delete many of the files and folders that had been restored.  And many of the restored files are corrupted in some way.  This way I can segregate the older, possibly corrupt files from the clean, fresh ones.

In the end, although a new computer is still very much in the near future for me, until I make that plunge, wiping my hard drive and doing clean installs of both Windows and my key applications gives a big performance boost to my computer.

Onward and upward!

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 31st, 2009 at 11:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.