Yeowsers. When it goes down, it goes down fast! I knew it was coming a few months ago so I purchased a spare hard drive to archive/install to.
Took about two and a half hours to recover my apps, data and settings and lost only one of my virtual machines (Windows Vista, for IE9 testing) and a few other Apps that I decided to just reinstall from the App Store, but I’m back up and going with all my old settings even without using Time Machine as my backup source.
Well played, Apple. Well played. Now to use Disk Utility to do a partition copy of my Windows Boot Camp to the new hard drive–we’ll see how that goes 😉