Groundhog Day: A Windows Briefcase nightmare

In the movie Groundhog Day jaded newsman Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is forced to live the same day over and over until he finally gets it right. Starting each morning with an alarm clock that blares "I Got You Babe," each day plays out exactly the same as the one before; only Murray knows that time should have moved on.

A remote colleague of mine just called in with his own Groundhog Day nightmare. Unlike Murray's character, he didn't get the girl in the end. And he may have lost his most precious data.

Today he woke up to find that someone had put his laptop in the Wayback machine: all of his data had reverted back to its state as it appeared some time in 2007. Everything he has done since then - all of his work - has disappeared. For someone whose work life exists on a laptop, it's as though a year of your life has been wiped away.

My colleague had been using Windows XP's Briefcase applet to back up his computer to a personal namespace on the corporate server. Briefcase is supposed to replicate data between a backup and primary data source. As I can personally attest, it doesn't always work well.

Apparently, Briefcase stopped replicating over the VPN more than 12 months ago. Then, suddently, it started up again last Friday. My colleague recalls seeing a pop-up message late last week as he was shutting down the machine - something about something being different on the server and laptop and whether to proceed. In a rush, he replied in the affirmative before turning off the machine.

Briefcase then proceeded to leap back in time, paving over his hard drive data with an old replicated image from the year before. Ironically, the same thing happened to me - and without any warning - about five years ago during my brief experiment with Briefcase. But I only lost a week's work. My colleague lost a year of his life.

Briefcase, a simple replication mechanism, is a poorly thought out predecessor to Apple's Time Machine. The Mac guy can leap back to any point in time, snatch up a few old files and make a quantum leap back to the present. I can see him looking over sympathetically at the hapless Windows guy whose Briefcase takes him on a one way trip into his past.

My colleague is now attempting to recover as much data as he can. It won't be easy, as my hands on experience and this step-by-step instructional story on how I recovered erased data attests.

My advice: Do your own backups. Do full, uncompressed data backups (storage is cheap) to a secondary drive daily, and verify the results. Do a weekly backup to DVD-ROMS and store them off site. Keep historical backup DVDs. And never - ever - use Briefcase.