Ok, not really, but I had to send my laptop off for a repair recently and so I used the opportunity to test my disaster preparedness. Backups don't count if you haven't tested them, so I did a separate full backup of my laptop (just in case my regular backup failed and sent my laptop off).

My work email and work documents were easy because I have those on my SureDesk. I just logged in from my extra desktop machine and was able to use email and have access to my documents instantly. If I didn't want to use my SureDesk I could have used Outlook Web Access (OWA) instead to access my email. One of the advantages of a SureDesk is the safety and security of being able to access it from anywhere and knowing it's backed up.

Unfortunately we don't have the development environment I use on a SureDesk yet, so I needed to set that up on my temporary machine. I use a wamp stack for my development and I had prepared for this by installing the necessary tools on my machine, however the source files I needed were not in my normal backup. That would have been a small problem if my laptop had really crashed. I don't backup all of my source code because I'm only working on a small number of projects at a time and backing up my entire source directory would be too much. Still, I should be backing up the projects I'm actively working on and this exercise showed where I was missing some crucial files.

Key Takeaway: It's important to try to retrieve key files from your backup from time-to-time to ensure that your backups are working and are backing up the right files.