Topic: Windows - My Documents

[lyonsden5]

Quoting RossRoy (at Invelos):
[blockquote]And you can move the My Documents folder anywhere you want.

In fact, any time I decide to reinstall Windows, I just point the My Documents folder back to it's rightful place: on my F partition which contains my data. And it just takes 6-7 clicks to do![/blockquote]

I would love to know how this is done. 

[DJ Doena]

Go to your Desktop.

Right click on "My Documents" -> Properties.

Then there is a "Move" button.

[RossRoy]

 

[lyonsden5]

sweet... and yet so easy 

EDIT: Thanks to both of you 

[Najemikon]

One step further for the brave amongst you, armed with screwdrivers! Install a second hard drive and direct My Documents to it. Then you know all your data is separated and if you need to reinstall, you can overwrite drive c: without a second thought. Or if you upgrade, just remove the second drive and pop it in your new PC.

It's great when you start a new PC, open My Documents and there's sod all there. Redirect to drive E: and bang, where did that 300gb of data just come from!

I install games on a separate drive too because they often don't need reinstalling on a new Windows.

[Achim]

sweet... and yet so easy 

It's always the first thing I do when installing Windows.

One step further for the brave amongst you, armed with screwdrivers! Install a second hard drive and direct My Documents to it. Then you know all your data is separated and if you need to reinstall, you can overwrite drive c: without a second thought. Or if you upgrade, just remove the second drive and pop it in your new PC.

I have three drives now. One is a "small" dedicated drive C:. If it needs reinstalling, crashes, or whatever, my data is safe.

The second drive has three partitions for data. (Windows used to be on one of them, but it still felt awkward, so I added the third one mentioned above).

The thrid drive is removable. Most of the time it is turned off for added safety. Every once in a while (not often enough  ) I fire it up, Synchronize it! with the second drive and then shut it down again.

[lyonsden5]

I am getting a new computer built for me now. The main drive will have a mirror drive. As I understand it everything I write to my main drive will be written to the 2nd at the same time. No more backups. The only way to loose my data would be for both of the drives to fail at once.

Can any of you tell me if this is not a good setup and why it wouldn't be? The only thing I can thing of is if I happen to get some type of virus it would be on the main drive and write itself to the mirror drive, making it harder to remove.

Input would be appreciated.

[Touti]

This basic mirroring is what we call "RAID 0".  It offers excellent protection against hard disk crash.  If your main disk goes dead for any reason, your 2nd disk serves as a backup.

However, as you said, any bad data will be mirrored as well so if you get a virus or if you make a mistake in something and screw up some personal data, you can't count on your mirror to save you.

I don't have anything automated for backups yet at home but here's what I plan on doing this coming fall.

I'm gonna get a Western Digital WorldBook II external drive which is also accessible from outside my home.  It has two 500G hard disks that can be either configured as a 1TB volume or one 500G disk with mirroring on the 2nd drive. Since one of my PC's is always on, I will use it to run backups every night from the external drive to that pc's local disk.

In case of a HD failure, I can switch to the mirror disk and instantly get back up and running but if I screw up somehwere and loose or damage my data, I can rely on the backups to recover it.  With this kind of setup I will be protected against disk failures and data failures.

[Achim]

Mirror drive... Is that RAID, basically?

We use RAID at the office to gain speed on the file server, as many people access the file server's hard drive at the same time. It is safe, if you are concerned about a hardware crash. It is still vulnerable to theft (most set ups, incl. mine, are, except off-site storage, of course...) and viruses (the virus gets mirrored as well !

If you want your data safe, I guess something like my set up is an option. The backup drive is mostly turned off, so it is not as vulnerable to viruses. It is removable, so in case of emergency, you could yank it out and take it with you; also can store it at another place in the house to reduce the theft risk. Only thing is: Always remember to make backups; which is a slight hassle, as you need to shut down the computer, turn the drive on, then backup the data, shut down again to turn off the drive.

[Touti]

RAID = Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disk

Note that I made a mistake earlier, mirroring is RAID 1, not RAID 0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

[Najemikon]

I think you may have the wrong idea about RAID.

RAID comes in two main forms: Mirrored for backups; striped for speed. There are other forms that are a mix.

It uses at least two physical drives to create a single logical drive in Windows. So, you cannot tell that you are using two drives from within Windows as it appears under a single drive letter.

All this you knew. However, they are not swappable or removable. If one of the drives in the array fails, the data will not be accessible until you replace that drive. The array will rebuild itself when the new drive is detected.

If you create a single array from more than two drives and one fails, it may be able to use the remaining drives to stay online. This is expensive though, obviously.

Ideally all drives should be identical. As a basic backup protection, yes it will work, but I wouldn't use it.

RAID used in servers is a very different beast. On our servers, each one has four drives. At a desktop level it's more of a novelty I think. Your RAID will either be software (not good) or built on the motherboard (better, not great though). It is very important to realise that if the array itself is corrupted or damaged in anyway, you will lose the data.

In other words, motherboard blows up = No data. The very situation you were guarding against.

I've used RAID on my PC before, but striped for speed with non-essential data. Used to process games or video rendering faster. But since SATA became the hard drive norm it makes very little difference. In fact, a basic non-RAID multi-drive Windows PC performs much smoother.

Whatever form of RAID you choose, don't put the system or pagefile on it. Have a separate C: drive for Windows.

Finally, even if desktop level RAID was fantastic, it's still not good for a backup.

The only good backup method is offline. Basic scenario, PC gets nicked, they took your RAID as well!

Take the money you were going to spend on extra drives for a RAID array and get an external USB2 or Firewire drive. Some of these come with two drives and have their own inbuilt RAID system, but I wouldn't be fussed. A nice fast 500gb external drive will do you nicely.

And back that up to DVD every now and again. There are only two types of hard drive: Dead and Dying! It's a mechanical unit and is wearing out as soon as it is turned on.

Oh yeah. If you backup to DVD, redo any archive discs every couple of years. Recordable discs can't be trusted over long periods of time.

That's enough of my scare tactics!

[Achim]

There are only two types of hard drive: Dead and Dying! It's a mechanical unit and is wearing out as soon as it is turned on.

I may be mistaken, but I believe RossRoy once told me about SpinRite.... SpinRite on Wikipedia

I didn't have an enlightening experience, but RossRoy (or whoever recommended it) had... (I am using it occasionally though.)

[Touti]

Jon, we use RAID in our servers as well and with RAID 1 (basic mirroring) you're not screwed if one disk goes down.  It's true that windows doesn't see two disc but if one dies, you can "break" your RAID and use the disk as a normal one.

We actually had to do it no later than last week when the master disk of SQL2000 server died.  But, as we both said, it's not backup solution, RAID is only good to reduce down time when you have a hard disk failure.

[lyonsden5]

  all of you who helped.

[Najemikon]

Jon, we use RAID in our servers as well and with RAID 1 (basic mirroring) you're not screwed if one disk goes down.  It's true that windows doesn't see two disc but if one dies, you can "break" your RAID and use the disk as a normal one.

We actually had to do it no later than last week when the master disk of SQL2000 server died.  But, as we both said, it's not backup solution, RAID is only good to reduce down time when you have a hard disk failure.

Yes, but you're talking server RAID there, aided by a server operating system. Happens from time to time here. The HP array just flags the dead drive, but no user would have noticed. That's Proper RAID! Desktop RAID is a poor cousin and isn't so freindly at recovering. I believe with the advent of multi-core processors and SATA, it's unnecessary as a performance boost, unreliable as a backup.