Daily Archives: October 15, 2006

windows

Windows Vista: no backup to tape

Windows Vista has a new user-friendly backup utility that can be set to do an automatic scheduled backup of your complete system. Very nice; but you can only backup to a file (locally or on the network), or to a CD or DVD. Tape is not supported.

I guess the reasoning is that backup to disk is generally faster, cheaper and more convenient than tape. It’s annoying for me, though, as I have some archive tapes and want to be able to read them. It looks as if I’ll need to boot into Windows XP or earlier to do so. I can’t see any easy way to run the old ntbackup on Vista.

Note that this restriction only applies to the free, built-in backup utility. There will be third-party tape backup utilities that will work fine on Vista. Nor is this relevant to most corporate users, where generally it is only the files on the server that get backed up.

Remember DOS backup and restore? It was notorious for incompatibility between versions. Looks like this is a new twist on an old problem. 

Tags:

blogging, software development

Moving to WordPress without breaking links

Some time back, I decided to migrate this blog to WordPress. Until today, I’ve been using a self-modified version of bBlog. It worked well, but WordPress has more to offer and has huge community support, so I’ve made the change. A few new things you will notice are the recent comments list, the search box, the blogroll, and limited html support in comments.

The change was delayed while I figured out how to handle old links. I didn’t want to break existing links to old blog entries, or to the blog home page; and I wanted to make it seamless for existing subscribers. In the end I did three things:

  • Installed WordPress into the same directory as the old blog
  • Modified index.php to redirect requests that point to old blog entries
  • Modified rss.php (the old feed url) so that it delivers the new WordPress feed

In other words, I’ve kept bBlog running in the same location as before. This trick works because the two systems only have one filename collision, which is index.php. The result is that links to old blog entries still work.

If you subscribe to the blog, you don’t have to change anything. The only annoyance is that you’ll likely get some duplicate posts, but I’m hoping that is better than having to re-subscribe.

I’ve only migrated a few recent posts and comments to the new blog. I might do the others, but it’s more likely that they will remain in the archive blog.

Tags: