Backups of Private Folder?

[Diggy]

I have Xp Home, and I have My Documents marked as "make this folder
private". If I have a catastrophic computer failure and have to reformat
the hard drive, will there be any difficulties with restoring the backups
from My Documents that I have made to CD? Is there anything special I need
to do, like back up some other registry key for future restorations?

I'd hate to find out at the wrong moment that all my backups are worthless.
It just occired to me that this could maybe be an issue . .

Making a folder provate doesn't actually encrypt it, right? If I ecrypt a
file THEN I have to backup the personal keys, right?

 

[Roger Abell]

How are you making the backups ?
If you have a copy of your account's My Documents
then you will be able to recover your data files from
a simple copy. However, in order to recover the
whole account you need to be able to recover the
whole system. For this you need to make full backup
including the System State (assuming you use NTbackup)

 

[Diggy]

I have two different backup routines. The main routine uses Handy Backup to
back up my entire My Documents folder, as well as my OE databoxes and
Outlook files and Favorites folder and also my Start Menu.

For the other routine I just manually copy a folder called Thesis to a CD.
The Thesis folder is originally located in My Documents. I was wondering if
copying this folder by itself would make it inaccessible later if I had to
copy it back to a completely different user account, because as it stands
now, only my current user account can access this Thesis folder because it
has inherited some access rights from My Documents.

I'm not trying to preserve my settings or anything else from my account.

 

[Kent W. England [MVP]]

Let's say you have to reformat and reinstall XP. You recreate your
account, but it will have a different SID than your old one. You try to
copy your old backup, but get access denied.

You have to "take ownership" of "foreign" files to get rid of unknown
SIDs from prior installs. Once you take ownership, it's easy to
manipulate the files as before. Read about taking ownership in Help and
Support.