SCOUG OS/2 For You - January 1999

Most OS/2 users are familiar with OS/2's Desktop Archiving capability. It will backup your desktop and other critical files such as CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT. But these days, many of us are on a network, and most of us use the Internet. It would be nice if the Archive tool would backup settings related to these functions as well.

Good news! The design of the Desktop Archive feature is flexible enough to backup other files as well. Start by opening the drive object for your OS/2 Drive. Open the OS2 folder. Then open the Archives folder. We will be making changes to the OS2.KEY file which contains a list of files that should be backed up. As a safe-guard, OS/2 marks this file read-only, so first we must make the file writable (so we can save our changes!).

Right click on OS2.KEY and select properties. In the settings notebook, select the File Tab, then click on the plus sign to change to the second page of the File chapter. Then uncheck the Read-only checkbox and close the settings notebook. (Once you are done making changes to this file, you may want to come back and recheck this option.)

Now double click on the OS2.KEY file to open it with the System Editor. Your file will look something like this:

    KEYFILE:OS2.INI
    KEYFILE:OS2SYS.INI
    KEYFILE:D:\CONFIG.SYS
    KEYFILE:D:\STARTUP.CMD
    KEYFILE:D:\AUTOEXEC.BAT
    KEYFILE:D:\OS2INIT.CMD

The concept should be fairly obvious; the word KEYFILE followed by a colon, followed by the name of the file to archive. So the only piece of information you are missing is which network or Internet files to archive. There is not an end-all list, but this is a good start:

File Name	Description
C:\IBMCOM\PROTOCOL.INI	Network adapter configuration
C:\IBMLAN\IBMLAN.INI	File and Print Services configuration
C:\MPTN\ETC\RESOLV2   or C:\TCPIP\ETC\RESOLV2	TCP/IP DNS configuration
C:\TCPIP\BIN\TCPSTART.CMD	TCP/IP configuration/startup
C:\MPTN\ETC\TCPOS2.INI	TCP/IP and Internet dialer configuration
C:\MPTN\ETC\HOSTS   or C:\TCPIP\ETC\HOSTS	TCP/IP Host table
C:\NETSCAPE\BOOKMARK.HTM	Netscape bookmarks
C:\MMOS2\MMPMCD.INI C:\MMOS2\SPI.INI C:\MMOS2\MIDITYPE.INI C:\MMOS2\MMPM2.INI	Multimedia INI files

Of course change C: to the appropriate drive letter for your system.

The next time you enable archives, these files will be archived in addition to your desktop. If you don't have it setup already to enable archiving, open the Desktop Properties and select the Archive tab. Then check the box labelled "Create archive at each system startup." Once you've rebooted, remember to go back and turn off archiving.

Notice this concept is not limited to OS/2 related files. You can use it to backup application configuration files too. But don't go crazy, three levels of archive are maintained, and if you are archiving files that are larger than a few kilobytes, that can add up. The result may be that you don't have enough disk space to complete the archive process.

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