Thank God I finally performed a full backup procedure last month! I had been negligent for years.
Last night, around 11 pm, for no apparent reason, my computer decided that it did not want to restart! The screen blinked the Dell logo several times, then a crude almost DOS type screen appeared with fairly large letters and a few buttons. I stared at it for probably 15 minutes. I still could not make out what it said. My daughter was late getting to bed and I quickly asked her to read the screen. I think it said that the disk was damaged and asked if I wanted to Restore, Repair, or Cancel. I had her try Repair. It fairly quickly responded that a repair was impossible! I have not worked out the details yet for complete speech during a restore with Image for Linux. But I did have a CD with the standard Image for Linux handy, I had her pop it in, attached the external, USB powered hard drive and guided her through the menus. I only delayed her bedtime by no more than 10 minutes! We both went to bed. This morning, I asked her if it was successful. She said that it was and I ejected the CD and restarted. My computer was back exactly the way it was three weeks ago when I made the image! I then went to my network folder and located my nightly backups of my Documents, emails, JAWS settings directory and another Shared Data folder. By 9:00 am, All was recovered perfectly, except email (more on that later). Just in time! Over the weekend, my wife opened a letter from Lockheed, where I used to work, that our Medical Insurance was canceled due to nonpayment. I was shocked since I paid them all through a on-line service with my bank and they had cashed all of the checks! Anyway, I needed my computer first thing today desperately! With Image for Windows and Karen's Replicator that was no problem! Now for the question. Restoring the Image returned the state of my Windows Mail to what it was April 17, when I created the Image. I have been using Karen's Replicator to backup my Windows Mail "Local Folder" and its subfolders at: "C:\Users\Don\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Mail\Local Folders" to another computer. I deleted the "Local Folder" today on my restored computer and copied the backup folder to replace it. Obviously this is not the completely correct method to restore Windows Mail. Everything was restored correctly that was older than April 17. Old messages that I had read and kept in the same folder, like blind-computing were present, but marked unread. Any messages I had saved and moved to another folder are not present. I think all of my messages are still on the other computer. A few questions: 1. What should I be backing up every night for Windows Mail? Should I backup one folder higher, like the "Windows Mail" folder? 2. Is there any other procedure I should follow to have Windows Mail recognize the updated, restored folders? 3. Is there a way at this point to find individual message files in the backup and import them into Windows Mail again? By the way, yesterday I was creating a webpage to distribute status, scripts and such for various projects just hours before the crash! I mentioned that I have still not completed a CD or USB drive a speech during a Image restore and made a comment that I hope that I get it to work before I need it! I guess I better watch my comments, even though no one has probably seen those pages yet! Don Marang For answers to frequently asked questions about this list visit: http://www.jaws-users.com/help/
