Backing up and other stuff.

Hi all!

Bit of a yatter here, but some interesting stuff for people who don't know, and also, maybe I have some things wrong, in which case you might be able to correct me!

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Well, I had an interesting week with my system this week. I have installed about 20 oses.

What I have learnt, and it might be obvious to many of you is:

A) BACKUP your stuff. OK, well, actually, I already knew this, and my stuff was backed up, but I wanted to stress this point because of one of the things that happened.

My version of Vista went AWOL and corrupted its own boot loader code. Fine. I'll install XP. I delete all files and install XP on the NTFS partition.

*THEN* I notice that XP has started doing Vista-like things, like copying all files that gets put into My Documents, into "Users" instead, and "Documents and Settings" is hidden.

I figured, hey, this must be a feature of the new filesystem. Fair enough. I kind of expected problems to appear at this point.

B) NTFS is not necesarily the same as NTFS. Yes. Vistas filesystem is not the same as XPs. XP's chkdsk *corrupts* vistas filesystem. After the second loss of my OS (after a Defrag killed it....!?) I tested this. Running XP's chkdisk on a vista partition corrupts it, but it shows as OK in XP. the opposite is not true.

C) Keep your program files on a seperate partition to your OS. In fact, my drive layout is now

<PAGING partition:4GB><OS partition:10GB><Program Files:80gb><Linux-Stuff>

Creating a Paging partition ensures your paging file is at the start of the disk and defragging it is never necesary. It avoids the problem of getting your paging file stuck at the end of your hard disk!


D) Ubuntu is your friend. Seriously. Even if you just use it as a diagnostic tool, When the defragger borked my partitions up, I found XP would refuse to install, with "STOP: IRQ_NOT_EQUAL" messages. I then used the Ubuntu disk, and used GPartEd to destroy all partitions on the disk. XP then installed fine.

Also, I reccomend having Ubuntu installed as a secondary OS to provide basic file access functions, or if it works with your hardware, why not use it as your main OS?


E) Don't fiddle too much. you might break something. This, I have to say, is the *only* reason I have needed to reinstall Windows XP since SP2 came out. Every failure except the hard drive failure can be traced back to me trying to gain performance.

F)VISTA IS A HORRID OS right now. :-P It's got major signs of improvement, but it's not quite there yet. I reccomend staying with XP for the meantime.
One of the major things Vista enabled me to do was use up to date Nvidia drivers, but the extra performance was lost with the slowdown of the OS.


....OK, I'm done. Any more tips for the users?

My work was copied and stored on a 4GB thumbdrive.

And i have a swap HardDisk in case some silly damage I made to my PC....

4GB is not enough for me. I got a 500GB external USB drive and backup everything to that.

This product: http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=723367 looks quite interesting.

As HD storage is still the cheapest option by far, it would be nice to be able to keep a stash of spare HD's and just swap them in and out of that device. Using them essentially like any other removable media.

pretty sweet. Wonder if HDs like being used vertically?

I have about 1.8..ish TB of storage, I have a couple boxes with FreeNAS and raid them 5 + 1 which turns out pretty nicely and I have not lost anything since i've set up these boxes. The NTFS is suppose to be the same between the two operating systems but I can agree that ive tested this and there seems to be some kind of difference because going from Vista NTFS to XP NTFS causes weird behavior.

4Gb is the *swapfile* drive. where my paging file goes ;-) not my backup drive hehe.



yeah.

Couple of examples:

Put files in Documents and Settings- file appears in "Users" folder.

*TWO* program files directories appear if you *dont* wipe the drive when installing XP.

It seems that in Vista, "junctions" are a feature of the system but not in XP, so thats a major difference.

Also, files that went into the "Users" folder on the root of the drive also appeared on my backup copy of Users. This leads me to believe that "Users" is just a shortcut- IE, a Junction is just a better implemented shortcut.

Either way, its a bloody nasty hack doing it like that.

About the storage thing, I have 750gb of storage on a network attached device. All my project files etc, unless I need speed, come straight off of that. Only things like my music app run straight from the local drive as they transfer a lot of data from/to disk, and the networks not up to speed with that.

this is good stuff, I'm going to try and implement a back up stategy over christmas and Ive been seriously considering Acronis version 11 back up tool to back up my 2 laptops, and 2 larger workstations.

"c:\documents and settings" is actually no longer a folder, but a 'junction'. It redirects like to another folder, Kind of like a symbolic link in linux.

It's been supported by NTFS for a long time, it's just that Microsoft never gave you any tools to make them yourself. You can download sysinternals' 'junction' which allows you to make them, though. Very convinient.

run out of space on the C:\ drive? No problem, just make "program files" a junction to another drive...

Yup, I'm aware of that now. It was quite strange behavior at the time, though! Xp doesn't seem to handle Junctions very well though.

...HM!

Ok, question regarding that. Can I "Junction" the Documents and Settings" then to another drive, and have XP behave with that? cuz it seems I didn't give the OS partition enough room haha. I'm going to try that at some point. :-)

There are already established practises for moving Docs and Settings to other drives/partitions. I don't remember right now, but I'm sure there are details on MSDN.

Just look it up on google, everything is there. I already did this and have a lot of things on D:

Well, that was the intention, but I don't have much confidence in myself at the moment since I keep destroying my setup. ;-p Would rather know this works well before I try it.

I already have my program files on F: (registry mod to make the default install folder F: instead of C:.

This "junction" thing though, is new to me since the system first crashed. Actually i'm quite excited as it means I can organise things a lot better than in the past.
Saying that, if you've done it, I'll give it a go.

Second note: I'm *finally* back home *home* tonight. I have a lot of catching up to do....

I did it straight after instaling windows and video drivers. It's probably a pain if you have all your software installed already though. You can also do it by changing a text file before install. Thats supposed to be the easiest.

It's not that different to changing your my documents path in the registry only you have to make sure you change all the paths to the new location or your computer might not boot.

Was October 06 when I last installed XP that I did this, so I don't remember specific details on how you go about it.

Well, I couldn't junction the My Documents folder. Might try again later.

I don't want to be destroying my installation again though lol!

Right click on My Documents and select Properties.
When you've clicked on properties, select "Move" and then navigate to your D:? drive. Select the drive letter and then click "Make New Folder." Enter "My Documents" as the folder name and hit Enter and then OK. Windows will then ask you whether you want to move your documents; click Yes.

Moving your documents make take some time. Once moved, though, you can access them normally from the "My Documents" icon on the desktop or elsewhere.