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Have you tried mapping the FTP location to a network drive? This will make the folder appear as a normal hard drive with a drive letter in Explorer. If you don’t know how to map a drive, click START/Help and Support, and search “map network drive.”

There may be some FTP sites that do not support drive mapping, but I have done it before on corporate FTP sites when I was in that trade.

@ bobprimak

Yep, to each his own, and you are absolutely correct in that everyone should have some sort of backup plan!

By the way, I used to use Acronis with XP, but I abandoned it when I went to 64bit Win7 (I skipped Vista, but that’s another story). The backup tools in 7 are not your father’s NTBackup. To me, the interface is quite intuitive and elegantly simple in this version. It takes one click to make a Windows 7 repair disk, in case of an unbootable system, and this disk has a rich set of tools, including “restore from system image” and “restore entire hard drive.”

I did quite a bit of testing for a client, and have found the new system to be absolutely slick and reliable. The VHD method that I mentioned is largely undocumented. I learned of the ability to update system image files with Synctoy completely by trial and error, and it “just works.” (Apologies to Apple).
I have not heard of anyone else using this system.

But, you don’t need to use my undocumented system, all you need are the original system tools. I like spinach salad, and my wife hates it; I wouldn’t try to force her to eat it 😉

As a side note, I used to be die-hard Linux, only grudgingly using Windows when I had to because Photoshop and Illustrator won’t run well on Linux because you have to use the WINE emulator. Windows 7 changed that, because I feel it is slick running and elegant, even more so than Mac OSX. And it is much easier and prettier than any flavor of Linux.

Honestly, I used to use scads of little utilities, even some listed here, to accomplish mundane or repetitive tasks, but I’ve come to realize that the costs as counted in processor ticks, excessive memory usage, hard drive space, overall system speed, etc. actually made this practice counter-productive. If you dig deeply enough into Windows, especially Windows 7, there is usually a way to automate most tasks without adding dead weight to your system, such as through registry tweaks and small scripts–and you can find most of these techniques on Windows Secrets, or in this very forum.

I like a fast and responsive computer, and there are just a few utilities that I’ve found that can actually speed up a PC, which is the best way to make me more productive.

#1 on my must-have list is not free, but I feel it paid for itself in just a few weeks through helping me to increase my productivity. That application is Diskeeper 2010 Professional defragmenter. This version actually prevents hard drive defragmentation, and then silently cleans up any fragments that escaped the process. It runs invisibly, with no hit on performance due to only using idle processor time. The caveat is that by default it disables itself when running on battery power, so if you are off of the grid for an extended time, it has a lot of work to do when you do finally plug in. I have turned off this feature as I rarely work on battery alone for more than an hour or two at a time, so if it causes excessive battery drain, I have not noticed it.

#2 is called NTRegopt, which is a free registry optimizer that I learned about from Mark Russinovich of Windows Sysinternals. It is not a registry cleaner. It compresses the Windows registry files, removing the white space that accumulates, especially after installing or uninstalling applications. I run it monthly, and the results usually show an average registry files size decrease of 7%, or several megabytes. It makes the opening of programs, as well as booting up, noticeably faster.

#3 on my must-have list is that old standby, CCleaner. I use it monthly, including the registry cleaner function, just before I run NTRegopt.

I also set all three browsers that I use, IE8, Firefox, and Chrome so that they always clear the cache on exit. Chrome does require an add-on that is available through the extensions menu.

After 25 years of PC use, I’m realizing that as far as a PC is concerned, less is more.

Cheers.

VHD in Windows 7. This little known feature that is now built-in to Windows is what finally persuaded me to switch back whole-hog from Ubuntu to Windows. Windows 7 has made data backup and restore a dream compared to earlier versions. There is no need to clutter up your PC with heavy backup add-ons, free or otherwise. Because the included system backup tool is so good, I merely use the lightweight and free MS Synctoy for data backup. I found that rather than make a separate image and data backup, all I need is to make a system image file on an external USB drive. It’s very quick–it took me less than two hours to make the initial system image of my 500 gig notebook hard drive. Windows 7 backup images are compressed, so the resulting image file is only around 250 gigs–but will expand fully when restored to my system drive.

Your data can be backed up separately with Windows Backup and Restore tool, but there is a little known feature of that single system image that makes the time- and space-consuming dual system and data backups uneccesary.You can mount the system image, which is seen as a .VHD (Virtual Hard Drive) file in a subfolder of the WindowsImageBackup on your external drive. In the Computer Management console (which must run as administrator for this to work), if you right click on Disk Management in the left pane, you can mount that .VHD image as an extra hard drive. You now are capable of copying anything to and from that VHD duplicate of your system drive, provided you don’t make it read-only when mounting it. If you Dig deeply enough into the MS Technet site, you can find many scattered details about .VHD files.

I schedule a Windows Image backup once a week, but if there are any important files to backup in the meantime, I just copy them to the mounted system backup VHD, or wait for the scheduled daily Synctoy backup to take care of it. If you have to replace any corrupt system files on your C: drive, you can choose a restore point via “Show more restore points” in the System Restore wizard, and use a restore point that is located in the VHD. If you have an hour or so, you can restore your whole system, including the latest data, with this same image.

I mentioned that I used the free MS Synctoy on a daily schedule. I have it set up to copy new files directly to the system image VHD. Then, if needed, I can re-image my system, and all of the most recent work will still be there. I’ve been using this system for three months now, with no problems. As a believer in redundancy, I do keep a copy of my system images on an off-site drive, and I replace those VHD files with updated ones once or twice a month. I’m a photographer, and I make my living with my cameras and computers. I don’t take chances.