[kurtsiegfried]

First, before you start, take a backup of the laptop. If you make a mistake during your rebuild, you could lose your drive contents.

For Windows, the best way is to have an image based backup solution like Acronis, Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery, or just the Windows Backup built into Windows Vista, or Windows 7. This will restore a working copy of the OS from a time when it was previously working. If this is not possible, you'll most likely be in for a reinstall.

When you've reinstalled your OS, make sure you implement an automatic backup solution, so that you don't have to think about doing that backup each day. For your files, consider a solution like Dropbox, this will keep a version tracked copy of your files off your computer that will be easy to restore. Depending on your choice of dev tools, and how much you've customized them, it may be worth exporting a copy of the settings to your Dropbox.

This may not all help for this particular rebuild, but it can significantly lessen the pain if you ever have to do this again. Good luck!

[iworkforthem]

I guess that's no way to backup server configuration/setup, a lot part of my effort comes from reinstall the server, configuring the mySQL, ROR, etc. Possible to automatic backup those too?

[kurtsiegfried]

Version control like Git or other would be best for your Rails stuff. The apps should contain your DB schema. As far as your MySQL, you should be able to configure it to dump its backups into your Dropbox if you have enough space.

When you get your imaging set up, it will let you roll back to a point in time, so the server should come back.