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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dave Hanson who wrote (882)	5/28/1998 2:04:00 AM
From: Howard R. Hansen	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14778

>> "xcopy /h" at the command prompt should get you started.<< Yes, xcopy with the /h option does exactly what I wanted. I got faked out when I looked up the xcopy command in the on-line help file for DOS commands. This is what it says: "Copies directories, their subdirectories, and files (except hidden and system files)." Is there any place where one can find out what the options are for the DOS commands in the Windows\Command directory? The on-line help for DOS commands is only for the DOS versions of the commands and not not for the Windows 95 version of the commands. Out of curiosity does anybody know what the difference is between xcopy and xcopy32? Thanks for the help. I am glad these were mundane questions for the gurus on Dream Machine.

To: Dave Hanson who wrote (882)	5/28/1998 10:16:00 AM
From: Spots	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

I'm afraid I use mundane methods myself -- drag and drop with the explorer. As others have noted, I make a lot of use of explorer selectivity. I keep swearing I'll write a little demon (daemon for Unix folks) that I can hand a list of patterns and have it scurry around looking for updated files to copy someplace safe(er). But I haven't. But I will someday. I used the MS backup program for a while, scheduled by the Win 95 whatever-you-call-it that schedules stuff (system agent?), but I got so irritated with its recovery procedures, lack of, that I gave it up. I only generate a few files a day that I want to back up, so I follow a very simple-minded procedure: Make copy (or copies) in current folder (ctl-c, ctl-v). When that get's unwieldy, every few days to few weeks depending on how active and diligent I'm being, clean up and copy to network drive (which is mirrored on NT server, BTW). When that gets uncomfortable, as in guilt feelings, copy to CD-R. My plan is to copy to CD-R once a month. By that reckoning, this is January <G>. To try to answer ZPs question about critical files, I can only speak for myself. I don't have any illusions about being able to restore the OS after a disk failure. My aim is to be able to reconstruct the OS and installed applications by restoring the registry and, if necessary, refreshing the OS from the install CD. I'd rather face the occasional pain of reinstalling from scratch (provided my data is safe) than the constant pain of avoiding the possibility of an occasional pain. For this purpose the critical things are the boot sector and the registry hives (for NT), and, as I found out the hard way, the user profiles. (The user profiles also contain the user registry hive.) The boot sector isn't visible in the file system. You have to have a boot sector utility to get at it. Two come with the NT resource kit: one that runs under NT (and understands the boot sector format) and one that runs under DOS. The DOS version will only replace a previously saved boot sector. The NT version allows you to edit a boot sector, provided you can get NT up to do it with. You have to copy the volume master boot record and each partition boot sector to be safe. However, they only change if you change disk configuration or move the system root directory. In NT you can't back up registry hives while NT is running, which is what my second NT installation is for. With NTFSDOS I could back 'em up from any OS, but I need NT to restore them to the NTFS system partition. I wouldn't need a second NT if my NT system partition were FAT. Registry backup is different from my data backups. I do that monthly too <ggg>, which makes this March by my reckoning. You can dump the hives to text files, but something always screws up for me when I try it. As for hidden files, explorer has no problem with them, provided you are displaying all files. Here's my rule of thumb for that: ALWAYS display all files.