The Ubuntu Experiment

[Dotan Cohen]

2008/8/7 Mike McMullin <mwmcmlln at mnsi.net>:
> On Wed, 2008-08-06 at 18:13 +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote:
>> 2008/8/5 Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca>:
>> > That's still merely a matter of time, and you're naive to think otherwise.
>> > The "fixed" portions of an OS are to all purposes, unimportant.  Even on
>> > Windows you can restore those simply.  It's the user data that matters.
>>
>> In Linux, all the user's data is in /home/user. Where is it all in
>> Windows? Can you easily backup / restore a user's data in Windows
>> without backing up and restoring the OS? For that matter, transfer it
>> to another machine?
>
>
>  If you have the skills, you can mount a partition in the Documents...
> etc. folder, and that has pretty much the same effect, if you have the
> skills, why MS, doesn't make this easier to do for overworked and
> underpaid MSCE's is beyond me.
>

Not everything is stored in Document, however. The registry is full of
user information, some programs store data (not just configuration) in
Program Files, and some programs create their own directories in C:. I
have had to back up over 20 Windows machines' data to bring people to
Kubuntu / Fedora, and I've found that data can be anywhere. You are
almost certain to loose something if you don't back up the entire C:
partition. What I do now is go through all the programs in the start
menu and on the desktop, and ask the user what is important from each
one individually.

-- 
Dotan Cohen

http://what-is-what.com
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