The pitfalls of using “My Documents” as the location of your documents
Microsoft recommends that you put all your documents in “My Documents” folder. Hence, by default, WhizFolders selects that location when you go to create a new document. Let me describe the advantages and disadvantages of using My Documents.
Advantages:
- It is clearly visible in the left pane of the File Open dialog and in Windows Explorer.
- It seems easy to remember.
Disadvantage:
See what I said above, it “seems” easy to remember. The actual disk location of a My Documents is something very different and is very long. You will see the actual location when you open that WhizFolder document. It will be something like “C:\Documents and Settings\Sanjay Kanade\My Documents\my notes.wzfolder.”
Moreover, when a different user logs on in Windows, My Documents points to some other folder. This can cause potential problems if you do not understand how it works. For example, many users casually delete their userid to create a better one. They ignore all warnings from Windows and may lose all their documents in the process. Then they wonder where all the documents went. Take another example. Sometimes, you need to reinstall Windows and create users from scratch. You can lose your documents and settings.
There are means in Windows to back up your documents and settings. There is a backup program in XP that allows you to back up your documents and settings. See this page on Microsoft web site. If you have such a back up, you can restore it in the event of a failure. This is good to know. But who knows what problems might come up? I have never been comfortable with this My Documents strategy. What I prefer is described next.
Keeping documents in own folders
I always choose to put documents in a folder of my choice so that I know where they exist and can easily copy or back them up using any utility that I like. For example, I may create all my Word documents in a folder called ‘D:\my word documents.’ Similarly for WhizFolder documents, I may use a special folder ‘D:\my whizdocs.’ This makes it easy for me to remember where they are no matter what the login is. Even if I have to reinstall Windows, these folders are often untouched. For backup, I can keep simple file copies of these folders on CDs. I feel much safer this way, and I recommend you to do the same.
If you want to move your documents to a single folder, see Moving your existing documents.
Use the new Backup option in WhizFolders 6
In the new version of WhizFolders, we have given an easy backup button. What this does is, copy a document to a special folder that you specify only once as a backup folder for your documents. Multiple copies of your documents can be kept there, many for each day, and so on.
