Well, the good news is that the replacement hard drive, the +Backblaze backup drive, and the ASUS recovery discs all finally arrived and I had time last evening to implement the three.
And, hey presto, I now have a functioning home machine again.
I had today off, so it was largely dedicated to rebuilding the content of the system — reloading the key applications, restoring the data from the Backblaze drive, and getting things back to "normal". Which, at this point, they largely are, with a few noteworthy exceptions:
1. I finally got my Calibre installation working again, so that I can manage my ebooks, but it took a bit of poking and prodding as to the appropriate data libraries. I still have to re-download some key plugins.
2. My iTunes is not behaving well. I installed the latest version (a version-and-change since where I was), and I can get it to fire up, but it immediately starts chiding me about having problems with the library file. It operates, but I have to poke around at things each time I exit to get it to work again.
3. It turns out the problem I'm having with my WordPress log was not focused on my office laptop, but is a general problem, so I need to do some work to fix that.
4. I haven't yet tried to tackle my photo management setup with Picasa (web-based). I have been a real slug about managing my photos for a while, and I'm concerned about how both software changes and loss of the previous library might be teed up to really mess with things.
But, by and large the combo of Backblaze and Google have gotten me to 90% of where I was. Which is a darned sight better than I have been for the past couple of weeks.
Oh looK! ImageX. It's what we use at my job as well. It's free, but fuck if it isn't slow as molasses in January. At least when making an image, restoring one isn't too terrible.
+Les Jenkins Yeah, that part of the process as also tedious as hell — but it worked.
The ASUS restore got into an apparently infamous configuation/reboot loop on the last step. I managed to break out of it and, after the fact, get all the drivers reinstalled (also highly tedious, since I'd already put in a Windows password and the process rebooted frequently.)