TechArchive

Original article date: April 2002

I recently thought I might upgrade my laptop’s hard disk. Then I spotted a rather nice USB external drive. This one was 10GB, beautifully small, and even featured a carrying case for when it was not plugged into the PC. If the promise of plug and play is to be believed, this drive should immediately work when attached to any modern Windows PC.

Queuing at Denver waiting to have my laptop X-rayed, I got to thinking: could I reasonably travel with just this drive, and use a local PC wherever I found myself parked? And I came up with my dream scenario. The USB drive has all my data plus proof of licensing of all my standard applications. When I connect to a Windows PC that has ‘external data boot’ enabled (I just made that term up, by the way) the PC in question will make all standard applications that I have licenses for available to me, adopt a registry and desktop settings according to files on my personal hard drive, and be able to immediately use versions of uncommon applications that I have installed on my disk (after all, it has my registry info). That way all of Windows, Office, and the mighty Windows swap file would reside on the local PC wherever I happen to sit down, and my data and specific applications would reside on my small pocket drive.

If I got on a plane, I’d get access to a multiuser version of Windows (running on a single server onboard somewhere). The helpful airline staff would bring a keyboard/trackball to my seat, and I’d use my seat back LCD screen as the monitor. Even nicer, my Windows based palm-top would be able to work from the same USB drive, accessing the same files but with portable versions of the applications.

“Public use” PCs would load Windows from a ROM (copying an image into memory and thus getting booted in seconds) and all changeable files (except the swap file) would be on the user’s portable drive. Thus there is no virus risk user-to- user, and no possibility of corrupting the shared PC. And as only the user has a hard disk, the shared PC needs no moving parts if the swap gets implemented in RAM. Embedded versions could be built into top end LCD projectors, running a cut down version of Windows.

Want to work at home one day, at your desk the next ? Just carry the disk and have the same desktop at any PC you sit at. Now that WOULD be travelling light, wouldn’t it?.

Backing up and archiving

A reader has written in asking about backing up/archiving Outlook Express. He has tried using the built in archive function and it is not working out for him.

Firstly, backing up. For 95/98/ME single user systems you’ll find c:\windows\Application Data has a complete directory structure for each “identity” defined in Outlook Express. In NT variants (NT, W2K, WXP) there is usually a separate “Application Data” directory for each user. You can backup simply by copying this wholesale to elsewhere (or burn a CD with it), but always ensure OE is closed before backing up, or you will backup a version of the files that cannot be used for restoring. If you recreate this directory structure somewhere on an accessible hard disk, you can import data from it into an empty identity in Outlook Express. You even get to choose which mail folders to import.

Next, archiving. Here’s a trick I do. First I remove messages I don’t want to keep at all. Then I set up a new identity in OE. I go into that identity and import all the messages from the main OE identity. In the main identity, I cull the messages older than the cutoff date. This is what I have been doing for a few years now and it has allowed my message history to survive intact across many PCs and a few hardware failures.

April 2002