Thought of the day: Back up ad syncing

Professionals will tell you file syncing is not a back up system and shouldn't be as it is stupid, dangerous and very easy to lose data as versioning back ups don't exist.

When you sync you copy bad changes or delete the files you have already deleted, so effectively you have duplicated your mistakes where as back up you duplicate the mistakes but also have copies of the good data.


For me syncing is far easier in terms of managing my data, space required and time taked to copy files over to a back up disk. What i do as a back up procedure is back up my data once a year as a snapshot and then have a syncing folder which are active throughout the year and i only back up every so often but copy important files when they are created or modified.

So in result, I get a yearly snapshot for major recovery or regret deletions, a sync folder where all my data are synced to the computer every so often and a folder where important files are manually copied.

The effectiveness of my system over the backing up systems?, you decide. My main hate for back up software are the complicated versioning of data.

Simplicity that works! will be [G]EC Soft's New Slogan.

MozBackup

I re-installed Windows XP.

If you use Firefox and or Thunderbird and have some sort of data in those programs don't install anything until you have used this program, for Firefox it is great, restored everything so it looks exactly the same as my other Firefox before re-install.
Thunderbird hasn't been so successful, only add-ons have been saved, no e-mails or anything like that has been saved.

Very great for FF so far, I mean comparing to my other application, BackupFirefox which did nothing at all when restoring.

A 3.5/5 stars, losing points only because I couldn't get TB back up and running but will fiddle around with it and see how far i can go.

"Thunderbird is already running, but not responding.

"Thunderbird is already running, but not responding. To open a new window you must close the existing thunderbird process, or restart your system"

This is a stupid message i know. I searched through Google and Mozilla forums and didn't really find any straight forward answers so I am hoping to give you that here.
Most people will suggest that Thunderbird wasn't closed properly and has left a lock file behind that causes this error but i never found any "lock" file (sometimes called "parent.lock" and has restarted my computer improperly with Thunderbird on many times but never the less here we go!

This scenario solution is based on people who have their profile folder for Thunderbird moved to a non-default location (to back up there mail or avoid defrag or whatever) or has moved the folders of the default folder. If not try this solution anyway.

1. Open C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Thunderbird\profiles.ini
2. Change the value after "Path=" to "Path= C:\CURRENT FOLDER LOCATION" (no")
   
3. Save file
4. Open Thunderbird or restart and then open Thunderbird.

So as you can see the solution really works for correcting the location of your profile location. You may have to do this for other users on your computer if you moved their profile location as well.

Hope I have made someone's troubles go away ;D



EDIT: WINDOWS 7'S FOLDER IS LOCATED AT:

B:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird