There is an article on InformationWeek: http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199203346
It's about the shortcomings of Vista's backup function. Now it's from the perspective of helping Vista users work around some of the problems with Vista Back up functions. But if you read it from a GNU/Linux user perspective it is just one long list of real problems with Vista, and the real thing that caught my eye was all the solutions either involved a regression to NT or third party methods for backup --and this is with Vista Ultimate! But the absolute unbelievable one is this work around (one of several offered): "There's one supersneaky trick you can use to cheat the Vista backup tool. The one directory that does not get backed up is the \WINDOWS directory; that's left for the full-system backup tool to handle (assuming you can run that in your edition of Vista). Therefore, if you want to exclude a given directory from being backed up, simply make it a subset of the \WINDOWS directory and create a shortcut to that folder for easy access." "This isn't as dangerous as it sounds as long as you're careful not to overwrite or interfere with anything else in the \WINDOWS directory" [snip] "Here's how I did it: I created a subdirectory in \WINDOWS named _My_Stuff (note the underscores) and moved everything I didn't want automatically backed up into that folder. I then created a shortcut to _My_Stuff from the desktop so I could jump into that folder quickly if I needed to. Finally -- and this part is optional but useful -- I changed the access permissions on _My_Stuff and everything below it so I could edit everything in those folders without triggering a UAC prompt or having to launch programs in admin mode. I did this by giving the Users group the following permissions over the folder: Read, Write, List Folder Contents, Read & Execute, and Modify. (You can also assign the same permissions to your own user account specifically if you'd rather not do it by user group.)" The hackers among you should be averting your eyes (or laughing maniacally) over this. The person writing this means well, but clearly has missed the point about the dangers of granting that sort of access to a folder in the \Windows directory. On the other hand it sure shows, as does the entire article, the fact that to start to approach even basic functionality with Vista (Vista Ultimate at that!), you must first begin by destroying the (rudimentary) security features in Vista. Reading this article will make you laugh, or cry, depending on if you're feeling sympathy for the poor users of Vista, or looking at the sorry thing Microsoft is trying to pass off as... well whatever they are currently touting Vista as being the cure for. It sure can't be security... or usability... well not in a rational world anyway. Don. -- GNU/Linux is the future. Join the FSF: http://www.fsf.org/register_form?referrer=4458 Get the Real Facts: http://BadVista.org _______________________________________________ Advocate mailing list [email protected] http://badvista.fsf.org/mailman/listinfo/advocate
