How easily things can go wrong

(or how a simple OS update lost both sound and email!)

My problems started because I decided to install the Windows 7 service pack and is a typical mess caused by not realising all that was going wrong and getting in an increasing mess as more things went wrong as a result.

Because installing SP1 left me with speakers that were not working I got into a situation where I could not get my email. As ridiculous as that may seem, it was quite logical at the time... Here's the sequence:

1. Install SP1 via Windows Update. All appears to go well.
2. Open a YouTube video and can hear no sound. Check speakers and though Windows tell me they are working and green bars go up and down on the test in Control Panel, no sound comes out. Check that I have not set the speakers to mute.
3. I have a cloned hard disk that I made only the previous weekend so I decide to pull out the faulty drive and slot in the previous, pre-SP1 drive. Before I do that I realize I must copy the important constantly updated files to a USB stick: MozBackup copies the necessary files for Firefox and Thunderbird; I copy the data file for KeePass and the couple of text files I was working on.
4. I boot to my desktop as it was a week ago and all looks good, and I restore the files from the USB stick.
5. Thunderbird tells me it can't connect to my main mail server and as I look down the left-hand panel I realise it has gone back in time; there's mail for a domain I let expire six months ago, and some mail addresses I set up several months ago are not there.
6. I find via Google where Thunderbird keeps its profiles and go into my Acronis backup to copy the files from that backup. But when started Thunderbird shows the same ancient setup.
7. I sleep on the problem and next morning do some more Googling. It seems that Thunderbird profiles can be in two places under Win7 and this has been causing confusion for some users. I'm now among those. The profile in Vista was usually under the User folder tree going into the Local branch. But in Windows 7 it can be found in both the Local branch and the Roaming branch.
8. MozBackup had copied and restored the wrong Profiles folder. So I copied the Acronis backup files for both and at last Thunderbird opened with the right look. But missing the mail I downloaded after doing that backup. Of course immediately I opened Thunderbird it started downloading the overnight mail, quite a lot of it.
9. Fortunately I remembered to add an ".old" to the profiles folder before restoring the right one, and I can remember a couple of the emails lost in the interregnum so there is a good change they are in the ".old" folder somewhere and Thunderbird does store its mail in text files so all is not lost, just well hidden.
10. I still have not reinstalled SP1, so the job which started all this has still not been done. But I have found that there is an updated version of MozBackup. Mine dates to before the latest release version 1.4.10 from December 13, 2009, (which added support for Thunderbird 3) and there is a beta version of 1.5 dated March 7, 2011.

I have also found that MozBackup files are just Zip files, so, if you change the extension to Zip, you can look inside them and be selective. It may seem paranoid but I have also started to back up the mail files (now I know which are the right ones to back up) every four hours.

Lesson learned: no matter how well prepared you think you are, you can still get caught.