For one reason and another, I have recently had both my work and home PCs wiped and reinstalled. This can be an extremely fraught process, but as most of you will know, it’s all about backing up stuff beforehand. Every time I’ve done it before now, I’ve forgotten to back up something, and it’s usually just as the formatting process completes that you realise that the vital document was either in My Documents or on the Desktop rather than safely squirrelled away in your data partition (you do keep data in a separate partition to your OS, don’t you?) and there’s no way of getting it back short of lengthy data recovery techniques the like of which I have posted about (at length) before.
But I’ve now done this so many times that I’m pretty much aware of all the pitfalls. I now use MozBackup to handle my email, addressbook, bookmarks, extensions, and generally everything Mozilla-fied that needs backing up. I keep most of my shit in a separate data partition, and I know to back up the important parts of My Documents just in case. I have it pretty much handled.
One thing I liked about running Litestep was the option to have no desktop icons, as LS provides many different ways to launch processes and programs. Personally I’ve always been a desktop creature of habit. I always have My Computer top left, Recycle Bin bottom right, shortcuts to my drives top right, email and browsing program shortcuts alongside those, and then commonly used program icons flowing down alphabetically from My Computer, and filling up two or three columns on the left of the screen.
Thing is, this inevitably led to Desktop crufting. I’d drop a file or two in the middle of the desktop while doing something “just for now” and in a week there would be 4 or 5 files, then a folder to keep them in “temporarily”, then another, then a whole area of the desktop set aside for such things, plus shortcuts to things I don’t really use cropping up next to my drive icons… you get the picture. (NB: when I ran Litestep, this was still happening - I just didn’t see it.)
Now, however, I have decided to take a leaf out of Litestep thinking and have no shortcuts on my Desktop except ones to my drives. (That’s just plain useful and time-saving.) I now launch absolutely everything - at home and at work - by either using the plain old quicklaunch flyout, or using the wonderful Launchy.
Now my Desktops are 97% clearer, and so is my mind.
Alt+Space FTW!
–c.
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If you’ve ever thought about going mac it’s got a couple of really nifty backup tricks.
If you clone your current drive before doing an upgrade you can use the ‘migration asst’ once you’ve done a complete reinstall. This see your cloned backup as another mac and imports all your files, setting and preferences without all the junk. A bit like the windows files and settings transfer wizard but better. Plus you have a complete backup if it all goes tits.
The new 10.5 leopard release also has an automated backup system called Time Machine. it’s a bit like windows system restore, but backs up everything, and then backups changed files every hour! You can then roll back any file on the drive, be it system or document to a previous state.
Not that I’m trying to sell a mac to ya, but i know you’d love a mac book pro
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