A Little Background
So a little insight into why I am writing this post. About 3 days ago I had a System Failure and it got me thinking about how easy it is to be prepared for a system failure yet so few people are ready for it.
Recovering from an OS Failure
In General
Regardless of what your Operating System is make sure you know what is running on your system before you have a system failure if nothing else it will give you a great starting point for rebuilding the system
Linux
On Linux recovering from a OS failure is simple if you spent the 5 minutes to install a backup tool such as timeshift that will automatically make snapshots of your system on a set schedule. if you have done this recovering from a OS failure is as simple as booting into a liveUSB environment installing your chosen backup tool and restore the most recent snapshot.
If you didn’t set up a automatic backup system then recovering on Linux is still rather easy all you need to do is still boot into a liveUSB environment and copy any config files and data you need to keep to a different drive then reinstall your chosen distribution then copy the config files and data back followed by a reboot.
Common Config Files to save
- Fstab
- Crontab
- Application Specific Config
Windows
Honestly on Windows i have never found an easy to use backup tool that worked particularly well. so instead what i recommend is insure you have any data you don’t want to loose either backed up on a cloud service such as Dropbox or OneDrive or to have it stored on a different drive then the OS and to just reinstall Windows and start fresh
TLDR
Take a little bit of time and plan on how you will recover from a system failure be it hardware or software so that it doesn’t come back to bite you in the ass down the road. Luckily i had done this and was back up and running within 2 hours and at that most of the time was waiting for updates to run