There is never a substitute for a full system backup...

What did I learn today? There's always something you miss when rebuilding a system....

After about a year, my corp issued laptop was dog slow. Though I'm sure a large part of it was the anti-virus performance vampire, (we use Mcafee Enterprise) the system was due for a rebuild.

I've done this a few times. In the past I've usually either done a straight filesystem dump or (if I'm feeling paranoid) imaged the system with something like Ghost before starting over.

This time I didn't. I was backing up across a 100mbit network link with limited space on the destination, and so tried to pick and choose. And, of course, I missed something.

Mydocs? Check.
Everything checked into subversion (so I don't have to copy the working copy)? check.
desktop junk culled and saved? Yup.
Itunes? Pod synced up.
Download directory? copied.
Bookmarks? Heh...I use google's browser sync for firefox...so all my bookmarks are backed up and synced between all my machines, all the time.
Putty settings? Had to remember where it stores them (super-secret registry location), but check.
Winscp settings...winscp settings?!! Awww...crud.

Ah well. If I had to pick something to miss, that'd probably have been it.