B
Blithe
This post is just intended to give & get info:
Background:
The other day, I accidentally logged off my profile instead of shutting
down. So I might have shut that session down somehow before my user
settings were saved. Oops! When I booted next, my desktop looked like I
had just newly installed W2K, I had lost everything including my ISP
settings, bookmarks, etc. and I had nothing to mutter but obscenities. W2K
has been so reliable for so long, I even forgot what my next step ought to
be because I never had to recover from such a goof.
My last backup was two weeks old but I thought that a full restore might
prove too drastic. So I booted an older backup PC, got the Microsoft
Knowledge Base, and hit upon "How to restore a user profile in Windows
2000." (last posted as Q314045) Excellent!
Well not quite excellent, because the support article explains how W2K
preserves the old folder for the user profile one has just lost and how a
newly named profile replaces it. Not excellent at all, because while my
directory tree listed my new, bare, unwanted profile, there was no renamed
folder for the one I wanted to restore. I could not find my lost profile
settings in any folder! Yipes! What the heck had happened?
OK, so I ended up restoring the boot drive and the Windows register that was
two weeks old. Rebooting after the Windows backup had performed the
restore, I happily rediscovered my old familiar desktop and lost computer
identity.
The main lesson learned here is that obviously one, absolutely, positively,
must backup more often.
The second lesson is that as reliable as W2K is, the system cannot predict
the results of all goofs we make because we cannot expect that all users
will screw up in identically programmed fashion.
Anybody have an idea how I succeeded in losing my profile folder contents?
And why so easily? Similar experiences? Better solutions? Comments?
My personal conclusion about this unhappy experience is that W2K ought to
have warned me before the shut down that I was about to lose a particular
profile.
Background:
The other day, I accidentally logged off my profile instead of shutting
down. So I might have shut that session down somehow before my user
settings were saved. Oops! When I booted next, my desktop looked like I
had just newly installed W2K, I had lost everything including my ISP
settings, bookmarks, etc. and I had nothing to mutter but obscenities. W2K
has been so reliable for so long, I even forgot what my next step ought to
be because I never had to recover from such a goof.
My last backup was two weeks old but I thought that a full restore might
prove too drastic. So I booted an older backup PC, got the Microsoft
Knowledge Base, and hit upon "How to restore a user profile in Windows
2000." (last posted as Q314045) Excellent!
Well not quite excellent, because the support article explains how W2K
preserves the old folder for the user profile one has just lost and how a
newly named profile replaces it. Not excellent at all, because while my
directory tree listed my new, bare, unwanted profile, there was no renamed
folder for the one I wanted to restore. I could not find my lost profile
settings in any folder! Yipes! What the heck had happened?
OK, so I ended up restoring the boot drive and the Windows register that was
two weeks old. Rebooting after the Windows backup had performed the
restore, I happily rediscovered my old familiar desktop and lost computer
identity.
The main lesson learned here is that obviously one, absolutely, positively,
must backup more often.
The second lesson is that as reliable as W2K is, the system cannot predict
the results of all goofs we make because we cannot expect that all users
will screw up in identically programmed fashion.
Anybody have an idea how I succeeded in losing my profile folder contents?
And why so easily? Similar experiences? Better solutions? Comments?
My personal conclusion about this unhappy experience is that W2K ought to
have warned me before the shut down that I was about to lose a particular
profile.