I recently reloaded my system from scratch. I wish I had thought to do this. I did it the old-fashioned, hard way of installing on a fresh hard drive and restoring things from my old hard drive. This way seems much smarter. (from MAKEzine).
recently got a new replacement laptop for work. I had a lot of stuff on the old laptop after 2+ years of use and so I didn’t want to have to rush myself in remembering everything in one or two passes before formatting it to send back to the office. There are always things I forget when I’m mostly focused on moving data files over: files in “hidden†places like IM logs and non-file based data such as product keys, configuration info, settings for programs and other stuff. So I decided the best thing to do was make it into a VM and take my time about reinstalling and configuring the new laptop to match.
[tags]Virtual machine, backup[/tags]