Delphi 2009 = A good test of my backup strategy

I installed Delphi 2009 today. In a fit of enthusiasm, I installed it onto my Delphi 2007 virtual machine...

That turned out not to be such a smart move. Not only did d09 fail to install (stopping 1/2 way through with a 'failed to find setup.msi' error), but it trashed my d07 install as well. I don't know how bad the trashing was, I killed delphi after the 10th "package not found error" on start up.

I am not blaming CodeGear for this, my D07 install was "customised" to fit on a small virtual machine, with several, possibly important, folders deleted, and with little free space remaining.

One of the many nice things about using a virtual machine is the ease of backups and recovery. In this case, it came down to a 2 step process

1. Copy fridays backup onto the computer
2. Use subversion to retrieve all the files changed since friday

Total elapsed time to recover was about 10 minutes, most of which was spent making coffee while waiting for the files to copy.

Moral of the story: If you are installing D2009 (or any other version), put it in a virtual machine.
And use version control
And backup regularly