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Solve : Moving chaotic data ... looking for suggestions? |
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Answer» A friend of mine came to me with her laptop that her whole family uses and data is scattered everywhere. She was wondering if I could help her get the data organized into folders for types of files such as music, pictures, documents etc. replication of a tree would be establishedYou get the idea. Make an abstract structure. Create a directory with a tree structure that makes sense. Populate the tree with shortcuts. Most application programs, in my experience, have no trouble using a shortcut to find the actual location of a file. The shortcuts take very little disk space ans allow you to use an alias name and an alternate icon. The are some programs that even do this for you. Some MP3 player software will organize your songs into play lists without the need to actually move the data. Also, photo album programs can do the same thing a deal with the problem of duplicated names. And you can even replace the Windows Explorer (Not Internte Explorer) with another program that does better job of organizing this. The advantage of using shortcuts is that you can move them, make new ones, delete them, modify them, rename them all without doing harm to the original file. And they are quick, very little system, overhead. Check this out: http://techblogs.wordpress.com/2009/01/31/15-windows-explorer-alternatives/ Hey thats cool ... I didnt even think about that. But the problem there would be when she wants to backup her data, it is still scattered.... so that I why I am thinking that the data has to physically move to a new path of C:\data\.... Maybe I should use more than batch, but a thumb drive as a cache to store the data, an intermediary bucket to move the data to, "but without the move command". An instruction that XCopys the matching data to thumb drive, then back to the C:\data\... then have a CLEANUP process after a verification that the files locates at C:\..."wherever they came from" matches the new location at C:\data\... I was thinking that this would fix the Cyclic Error issue with searching drive C and writing back to drive C and avoiding a loop. I suppose I could also use an exclusion, trying to figure out of the exclusion of path C:\data would work or if the thumb drive temporary file cache is a better idea. Thumb drive would likely slow down the process vs disk to disk without the USB communications bottleneck. What do you think? DaveLembke, You are smarter that you need to be. It does not have to be that difficult. The standard backup tools have all kinds of options that you can use to backup data and make special data sets with exceptions. You can even have the backup program detect files changed and make additional backups of just the files that have recently changed. Normally all the user data should be in the Documents and Settings area, if using Windows XP. Some application programs will put stuff in the Programs folder, which is annoying. But you can have the backup set selectively backup part of the programs folder. What I love about the backup program it can know where everything relay belongs. You only have to tell it to restore to original location and it will do just that. And if yo chose another location, it will duplicate the tree structure. Trying to do this in batch is a big chore. If you have another hard drive bailable you can transfer all of My Documents onto the spare drive and not ruin the My Documents link.Please read this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310147 My preference is to have My Documents of the main user on another partition. That way I can just backup all of the drive. Other users on not in the partition. Some files I do not use anymore I put into the documents of the other users. That is one case where I use the move. I do not need to do that very often. The are so many ways to backup it is hard to give a simple answer. But it is not realty hard. Just requires some fore thought. http://www.genie-soft.com/asp/community/KnowledgeArticle.asp?KBID=105 Hope this is of some help. And I am sure OTHERS here even more ideas about how they would take on this kind of project. |
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