DAMMIT I can hardly believe how brain-dead once again, after nearly 30 years in operation, the Windows Operating Systems are. They have fucked us hard up the ass YET AGAIN. You'd think that after 30 years the richest company in the world might actually get a few things right. Unfortunately, NO, this asshole company continues to screw us.
First, I'm FORCED to run the Windows operating systems at home. You can't be an IT professional without knowing at least rudimentary things about Windows, and there are ubiquitous programs that most folks like me need to run that are ONLY available on Windows.
I'm complaining about just a couple things today about Windows Vista. Now, I've been running Windows Vista for almost two and a half years as of today, and I have to admit that is the most advanced, logical, and user-friendly Windows Operating System that I've seen to date.
And yet, it still falls short concerning the most simple and mundane tasks that allow a user to work effectively on a computer. In particular, the methods and practices that allow a user to search for file names is and has forever been completely broken.
Here's the situation: As part of my most recent desktop computer purchase, I bought a secondary internal hard drive and installed it myself (thank you, Dell, for making such things relatively easy to do). The hard drive serves primarily as a secondary disk on which I can make a copy of my important files ("back them up on a secondary device"). Yes, I do also periodically copy all my important files to removable DVD's and store them in a separate place, but as a first line of backup defense, a second internal hard drive is an excellent start.
So the first thing I do after transferring my data from my older computer to my current one is I make a backup copy of everything important to this secondary disk. No problem--for every folder I want copied just open the main folder, open a backup disk folder and do a drag 'n' drop and viola everything copies just fine.
Now a couple week go by, and I've just created a couple important Excel files that I want to make sure I have backup copies of. OK; no problem--I just do a search for the file names that I want to back up, right? WRONG. I search for these files, and Vista tells me "No items match your search". Yikes. Did I mis-type the file name? Did I accidentally delete the file before I even had a chance to back it up? NO NO NO. Guess what? As it turns out, the search function will only search for "indexed" files and won't include that new excel document you just spent 6 hours creating.
Fine. So I piddle around a bit and find "search tools", which leads me to "Advanced Search". Good. So now I can refine my search a bit. So I do a search for every file that has a date more recent than the date I did my last full backup so that I can for sure include every file that has been created or modified since then. Wait a few seconds, look at the list of files that have been found. YIKES--my excel files are not included in the list! What the FUCK is going on?
I piddle around a bit more, then I notice a checkbox that says: "Indlude non-indexed, hidden, and system files (might be slow)". Oh, crap. Had I not noticed that my file had not been included in the search list, I might not have even noticed that it wouldn't have even been backed up! So this time I actually check the box and press the "Search" button yet again. This is now the THIRD time I've actually done a search for the file that I wanted to back up, and FINALLY I find that it's included in the list. And guess what? If I create another new file and want to back it up, I have to go through the same procedure again, because new files are not automatically "indexed".
This entire problem is just not acceptable. In UNIX, I go to a top-level directory and type a fairly simple "find" command and am able to find every file matching the criteria I'm looking for, not just "indexed" files or files that I would need to do an "advanced" find for. In Windows, not only does the "advanced" search command difficult to access, it also does not give you the results you're expecting. Argggghhhhhhh. This can potentially lead to folks believing that they've backed up a file when they actually haven't. Yikes.
So someone reading this post might be thinking: "Why not just use the Windows backup utility?" I'll tell you why. In my experience with windows backup utilities, there has been a single instance where I have actually wanted to restore a lost file that presumably existed on multiple backup devices (tapes, in this instance). The result I got trying to restore any copy of the file was something like "File was in use and was not backed up" or something similar to that. Fine. That's really freaking incredibly useful. The utility I was trusting to bail me out when I really needed a file restored doesn't work. That's great. Wow what a useful thing. I'll tell you that in UNIX over the past 3 decades I have restored probably dozens if not hundreds of files from backup tape. The number of problems I've had doing this? ZERO. Yet the one time I really needed a windows backup utility to work, it failed multiple times. Yeah; great GREAT operating system.
OK. So tonight, I decide that I haven't done a full backup even to my secondary internal disk in awhile, so I do so. Not a huge amount of data; maybe 35GB or so. Most of the items I need to back up are fairly trivial--just open current and backup windows and do a drag 'n' drop and I'm all set. And it works fine. But then I see that I want to back up my mail folders as well (I use Thunderbird for email). I see that the last full backup I did of my mail folders was a main folder called "Mail" with sub-folders called "Local Folders" and my main domain name. But I have no idea where these folders are on my hard drive. So I open my main "C:" hard drive and do a Windows Vista search for "Local Folders". After waiting 10 minutes or so, the result comes back as "No items match your search". I do another search for the name of one of the actual mail folders and again it comes back with "No items match your search". This time I cannot remember what I did to discover where this folder exists. It turns out that in Thunderbird I can right-click on a folder and do a copy of the folder location, then paste that location into a text file. So I do this, thereby figuring out what folder I need to copy to back up my mail files.
It turns out that the mail files reside under the "My Documents folder" in a hidden directory called "AppData" under several subdirectory levels under "Roaming". Fine. So I've discovered the actual directory where my mail folders exist and I'm able to copy them to my backup drive.
Some readers might be thinking: "why not just back up your entire 'My Documents' directory, or at least the hidden directory ''AppData' directory?" I'll tell you why. The "AppData" directory contains three folders: "Local", "LocalLow", and "Roaming". There exists little obvious information about what these folders actually mean and why they're important, but the gist is that they're mysterious for ordinary users like myself. Not only are they mysterious, but they're not even common-sense-obvious. I mean, this is a desktop computer. Why on earth would anything at all be stored in the "Roaming" directory on a desktop computer? God and Bill Gates know why, apparently. Furthermore, upon further investigation, I discover that large amounts of gigabytes exist in these directories that are actually *cached* browsing data for Internet Explorer. Why on earth would I have any reason at all to regularly back up cached browsing data?
I'm certain that there are thousands and perhaps millions of system administrators who have been told or have learned that under Vista they should be regularly backing up the entire "My Documents" directory of all of their users. And likely 90% of them don't even realize that the bulk of what they're backing up is gigabytes upon gigabytes of essentially useless cached browser data. What a freakin' waste of: (a) administrator time; (b) disk space; (c) backup time & bandwidth. This is a concept I luckily caught early on and therefore was able to determine I should store my "real" data under a completely separate folder instead of "My Documents". Imagine a typical office worker who has maybe a few megabytes of actual useful data stored under the "My Documents" folder who has their hapless administrator back up gigs and gigs of worthless cached web browsing data every night.
30 years. That's how long Microsoft has had to "get it right". What's the problem?
--SDP
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