I did something bad. I configured the MSI installer to unpack Strawberry over my existing Strawberry installation.

Deja vu: Strawberry Perl, from 5.18 to 5.22

That leaves one question: If your Strawberry installation has some value for you, why don't you have a backup? And what about the other data on your computer? Do you care about it?

Getting your data backed up is not that hard. I currently use UrBackup (free and open source) for Windows machines, it comes with an ISO image for bare metal recovery (from images), but also does file backups. It runs on a Linux machine with sufficient disk space, and only needs a small agent running on the Windows machines.

For unix machines, I use a script running rsync that creates incremental, hardlinked backups. It started as a script downloaded from somewhere on the WWW, but I have rewritten it several times to match my changing needs. Still, it basically does what that old script did:

1. Mount the backup disk: mount /dev/some-disk /backup
2. Create a hardlink copy of the previous backup: cp -al /backup/day-1 /backup/day-0
3. Update the copy to the current state, i.e. create a backup: rsync -axHAXS --delete --numeric-ids /source /backup/day-0
4. Rotate the backups, deleting the oldest one first:
   1. rm -rf /backup/day-3
   2. mv /backup/day-2 /backup/day-3
   3. mv /backup/day-1 /backup/day-2
   4. mv /backup/day-0 /backup/day-1
5. Unmount the backup disk: umount /backup

That also works nicely and safely via ssh, so you can create a backup on a remote disk or RAID. Better yet, if you run a bunch of Unix machines and a backup server, you don't need anything but ssh and rsync installed on the Unix machines, the backup server can do the backup by tunneling rsync via ssh. We use exactly that setup at work.

Alexander