Oh man I scared the hell out of myself tonight. I thought I'd do a different backup tonight and do a full copy of my hard drive to an external hard disk. Usually I do a selected backup to DVD every week or so with a few quick copies of the stuff I'm working on to the external drive. I thought it would be good to do a more complete snapshot for a change.
Windows File Copy is not an option to do a file copy based back up. The problem with Windows is that it can't reliably copy files – one file that is locked and the whole copy process aborts. Here we are in 2006 and we're talking about 'exotic file systems' like WinFS and Windows can't even copy files with something as simple as a dialog that let's you skip a file it can't copy. Pathetic…
You can use command line tools like XCopy or RoboCopy but the experience is a little less than stellar. So, I dug out my trusty copy of Beyond Compare which besides being a great tool for file comparison can also work well as a file copy utility. So I mapped most of folders to a backup directory on the external drive, got the thing started and went off to watch a movie.
An hour and a half later I walk into the room and the copy is not even close to done – it's on file 23,000 of 75,000. Yeah it's a lot of files but it shouldn't take this long to copy files between two fast local hard drives over a firewire connection. So I look at what's going on, and I notice – wholly crap – all the files on my local drive are gone. Well, less than half actually but that's enough!!!!
It turns out when I started Beyond Compare and its copy operation I accidentally started it using MOVE instead of COPY. Move tries to move files to the target and it deletes the files it has copied from the source. Big difference! Luckily BC doesn't do a hard delete but deletes to the Recyle bin by default. Thankfully… or so I thought anyway.
Problem is, have you ever tried to open the recycle bin with nearly 30,000 files in it? It's not pretty… It's a good thing this machine is a dual core machine - one of the virtual CPUs was locked solid while trying to open the Recyle bin. Worse I had deleted a bunch of stuff over the last couple of days in the midst of doing some housekeeping without clearing out the files. Hence the extra 7,000 files or so. Some of these were also files that were then written again later over the last few days, so a straight restore wouldn't work.
The Recycle bin doesn't support selecting multiple files to delete or restore – your options are delete/restore one at a time or do the whole thing. Now with 30,000 files in there even selecting individual files is very slow and I had to go search through the deleted files up to the copy date of today…
Aaaaaargh. Pain-ful. The whole restore process took close to an hour as a had to sift through the previous deleted files and figure out which files really needed deleting so they wouldn't interfere with newer versions.
Ok. So after this episode I'm looking for a good file management and copy utility. Anybody have any suggestions for good tools? Am I just asking for trouble like this again by using Beyond Compare?
I'm happy to report that I got all of my files back and my system is back to the way it was. Almost, almost there was the opportunity to get rid of XP again and install Win2003 after all. Nat….
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