From Newsgroup: alt.comp.os.windows-11
On Wed, 3/18/2026 5:40 PM, micky wrote:
Two part question.
I'm doing a test backup of my HD, only .txt and pdf files, to see if my
new backup routing skips to the next command when using the FOR command.
1) Important: It found and copied all the .txt commands with one
exception, from the x86 programs, EaseUS\EaseUs to do...\res\Italian\Istruzioni di ripristino.txt . I don't speak Italian
so I wouldn't use these instructions anyhow, BUT when I go to the source
(my laptop) there is all sorts of garbage in the Italian folder,
inclding other folders.
Am I right that I should leave well enough alone and not try to delete
this stuff, since it might point to important files that I need???
2) A matter of curiosity: While I had one flashdrive plugged into the
4-port hub, it had a Drive letter of E. When I plugged in a second one,
it got E. and the first one got bumped up to F: That seems very strange
and improper. What do you think?
The hub has 4 ports and the first E: was plugged inot the farthest
from the input cable. The next one was plugged in the 2nd from the
cable. Do think this is he reason the new got the lower letter and
evicted the first one>
3) Number 3 is mostly a matter of curiosity: This was an old 16Gig,
USB2 flash drive that still had some room on it so I just used it to
test. It copied all the .txt files and was working on the .pdf files
when the PC beeped, the cmd box said "Drive Full", the drives
properties, which had reached 9GB used, now said 0 used and 0 free, but
the light on the drive kept flashing for 10 minutes until I turned off
the power to is using the switch on the hub.
When I turned it back on Propeties now said it used 3 gigs but Folder
Size, which adds up all the individual sizes says 63 gigs. 4x the size
of the whole flashdrive. At first I thought it wa following the
directory links from the problem mentioned in 1 above, but that was mmy laptop, not the flasdrive, which never had copied
Meanwhile EVerything says there are 1200 pdf files in the destination
drive, and every one I looked at worked fine. So it didn't delete
anything when the drive got full.
So why does Properties think it only has 3 gigs?
Let's say we are working on the foreign D: drive
explorer D:\users
Say the owner name if Greg. We can open ZIP or 7ZIP and
do an add-to-archive, and convert Greg into the entire
user tree that the owner used to have.
The archiving tools support uncompressed ("Store") mode
and a compressed mode. The output can be stored in a
single file, or in multiple 4GB files (like if working
with FAT32 eventually). The 4GB files it makes, will be
a few bytes short of the FAT32 limitation (as the assumption
with a 4GB file, is that it is headed for FAT32 media).
You can place the archive output greg.7z on your hard drive.
The tool has an option for Self Extracting Archive (SFX), and
while that isn't my preferred method, it should work for a
USB-stick-present.
In that way, you can capture the users home directory and
send it to them. They can unpack it any place, as we attempted
to make the archive a relative one, without absolute paths in it.
*******
For users who put folders all over the place, copying is harder
to do, as you do not know where the materials are located.
And the automation to do the analysis is just too complicated
(character sets are the problem, wide characters, UTF-8,
the tools don't all understand character sets and so on).
I can make a command to generate a file list.
I can manually issue a command to determine a file type.
Like cygwin, these happen to run in Windows.
$ find D:/bin -type f -printf "\"%p\"\n" # Zaretski port on Sourceforge
"D:/bin/a/b/French Ç/test.txt"
"D:/bin/a/b/test.txt"
"D:/bin/a/test.txt"
"D:/bin/test.txt"
$ file "D:/bin/a/b/French Ç/test.txt" "D:/bin/test.txt"
D:/bin/a/b/French Ç/test.txt: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators D:/bin/test.txt: Unicode text, UTF-8 text, with CRLF line terminators
It's the glue steps to make a script out of that, which present
a challenge. Regular users always leave hand-grenades in the file system,
for your automation to trip over.
Paul
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