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[Jac5r]

Filehamster is one of the best programs I have.  Here is an issue I would like to report to you,  hopefully you can use this info to further improve the program.  

I have written a batch file (.bat ending) to clean sweep my PC  after surfing.  So just del *.*  in all directories I want to have empty,  like cookies directories, and all kind of history logs and other crap.   It  autostarts at switch on.

The problem begins  when I do a system recovery to an earlier date,  windows restores all batch files to that earlier date.  Including the one that I have written myself.   So Windows is playing Filehamster so to say.  It has saved those old versions somewhere. It removes the newer versions, and restores the older versions.

So far so good.   So I tried to use Filehamster to get back my files.  However.......  Windows did a good job! It has gone into the Filehamster files too.   I have those on an external drive that I use only for Filehamster.   On that external drive,  Windows deleted all newer versions,  and restored the older versions in there.

I do not want windows to poke around in my filehamster back ups, and delete files in there.  This is really not what I want.

I could repair this,  by be undoing the system recovery,  my .bat files  were present again. Then copy those as .txt files and do the  system recovery again.   That created a kind of backup that windows in not interested in.

For the time being,   my life insurance is now,  to make by MSDOS an xcopy of the filehamster drive on another drive, and unplug this other drive when it's done.  







 

[JohnRen]

Wow

I would've not imagined this is what Windows is doing...I'll have QA try that one out on out end to see if we are seeing the same results.  I agree with you that Windows shouldn't be messing with '.bat' files outside of the Window's primary directory.

I can't think of a way to resolve this.  We went out of out way to keep the original extensions on the revisions so that they could be more easily opened by the host application.  It is a shame that Windows is doing this.  

I wonder if Microsoft put any kind of an option in windows so you can configure this behavior?

[Jac5r]

Hello John,

this is a long message,  please read it...

Filehamster ist the only good backup system I know,  I can see what it does,  and when. 

And GREAT support too!

So yes this is bad haviour of windows, changing files outside windows.  I see no solution either. So here is what I did:

Filehamster saves  to a dedicated drive, called J: 

I bought another external drive, called it I:   When I do a quick format on I:  that empties it in just seconds.
Then I do xcopy/E/D/C  J:\*.*  I:\*.*   and there you are:  a clone of the filehamster drive.  This command skips all files that are already present at the destination drive.  Since FH has the date + version inside the filename, that works just pefect,  when I just update it.  It writes only files that do not excist yet.

So the first time it takes two hours (my files are very many).  But then an upgrade is done very fast.  For this I have a very simple batch file with just that line in it.  So I can't mistype the command.

In the rare case I loose my filehamster drive, I can restore it.  One can easily loose a drive. In the 15 years I have my business I lost a hard disk twice.  One crash, and a virus.  Add to this the Microsoft pokes inside the FH files... I see potential risk.   

Now I keep detached clone of my filehamster files. This is the one and only real 100% safe way.

I was thinking  actually this would be a VERY nice feature of filehamster.  Probably easy to implement too.  It's just that simple DOS command that does the job,  you could build that into filehamster as an option.   Then all I do, is tell filehamster what is  the backup drive, and how often you want a back up. Like  once a month or so.  Then filehamster would pop up with a message:  Plug in drive :I, and when it's done it would say: Now unplug drive I:  The first time it takes two hours,  after that  much less.     

So the plug an unplug is what makes the safety.  This plain "hard" copy of the filehamster disk I store in a good place.  I do this by hand now once every three weeks.   The backup drive is to be un plugged after a backup. 

Well just an idea.   I would call it the "clone" option. 

Jac

[JohnRen]

Interesting idea...I will move this thread over to another board dedicated to extending FileHamster with cool little tricks and ideas such as this one.

Something else you could consider is using the ftp option which is very similar to replication except it uploads the files to an ftp server that could be located off site and well out of reach for Windows.  This would give you the absolute safety of knowing your files are backed up somewhere safe in case of theft or fire.

Glad to see you happy with the tool.