I just had a conversion with my wife about my recovery experiment on the 13th.

She said, "If you're going to do it on purpose, you better do a full backup first."

Should I? If I'm really testing my backup solution, it better work whether I do it on purpose or not. Hard drives fail and I won't be able to do a full backup before mine fails, so why should my test be any different.

I feel fairly confident that I can recover nearly everything, without a full backup first. I may lose emails from my computer, but I keep everything on the server for seven days before deleting it, so even that should be fine.

I feel okay about trying this, and I'll still have my old hard drive if I need to go back. I feel that it's really important to try a real world scenario and not fudge the results by running a backup right before I try this.

"Well, you're doing it with your hard drive."

Yes, dear. I won't touch your computer.