Re: Correction to ZIP: Mass Removal of Archive Bit on All Directories

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from Patricia M Godfrey  on Thu, 4 Mar
2004 12:29:26 -0500

Patricia:

> the whole point about Windows is that backing it--and Win32-native
> apps--up is pretty much an exercise in futility.

Pretty sweeping generalization. Why? Twice it's saved my skin to be backed
up. And I restored flawlessly. Lost my hard drive once (it just failed); the
other time a ten-minute burst of rural power fluctuations (lights up and down,
according to someone who was present) blew my power supply, and "something"
happened to make the hard disk unreadable (but still usable -- reformat and
restore). Oh, and somebody retched on a notebook -- so three times. And also
a fourth, when I deliberately reformatted a Win2k boot drive and restored, just
to make sure I wasn't relying on a delusion.

> Not merely does BBG not want you to do so, and make it as hard
> as possible, but sooner or later you're going to HAVE to reinstall the
> whole ruddy thing. It morphs.

I agree that BBG always wants us to buy the latest and greatest, but he does
provide some useful backup and restore tools, at least under NT. Where they
fail is in backing up the Registry; but freeware ERUNT does that right. I'm
_positive_ that I'm 100% covered with just those two programs. I have two
Scheduled Tasks: every morning, 8:00am, ERUNT backs up the Registry; every
Tuesday morning, 8:01am, I back up all drives to a second hard drive using
built-in NTBackup.exe. I have a very big, very loaded bootdrive. It restored
perfectly. Yes, they

> use some kind of nonnative format

(also known as compression!)

> and require that you reinstall

but hey, you stick the CD in the drive and perform a basic install, then
restore (lastly, restore the Registry). That's better than starting from
scratch! No?

> Especially as Windows really NEEDs that periodic
> reinstall to clean out the detritus it accumulates.

Why?

> By the bye, that's why I will NOT touch XP.

I don't understand the connection. Are you sure that you don't have these
problems _because_ you won't touch NT? I have a lot of NT machines --
altogether... I count seven right now, and many old machines that I've junked.
I've never re-installed Windows on any of them. Not a true re-install for the
reasons you cite (restoration is different, IMO).

"Detritus" isn't quite accurate. The problems that may (or may not) accumulate
are pretty specific. You just don't know what they are, so you call them
"detritus". There are excellent tools for clearing them out. Freeware "SpyBot
- Search & Destroy" is a terrific program for killing that stuff, and for
inoculating your machine against their reappearance; I recommend it to
everyone. To me, MUCH more valuable than virus scanners. SpyBot has some
useful secondary tools too, e.g. for listing programs that Startup
automatically -- you used to have to rummage around in the Registry to find and
delete them, which was a royal pain; SpyBot summarizes them all nicely, and can
move the pests into a passive area where, if need be, you can always fetch them
and reenable them. Although rummaging around in the Registry is good for the
soul...

R.

-----------------------------
Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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