I started it at 4:00 this afternoon. Two hours and 45 minutes later I decided that no matter what else was going on, there should have been some indication of progress. So I shut it down, again. Which, as with all the other times, meant logging off and on again.

Hitting "cancel" doesn't stop it. It kills the monitor job, but the engine, which clearly was stuck in a fail-retry loop, kept going.

This run was longer than any of the other three fails, but it only managed to archive 540 megabytes before losing its mind. One of the others managed to archive 2G and reach the point where it thought there was only 13 minutes left before locking up. This one only got 16% of the way in and told me 49 minutes left. (For two hours it told me "49 minutes left".)

Oh, and it locked up in a different directory this time. Something called c:\Windows\System32\migwiz\dlmanifests\

I've been doing one particular thing: saving the system state. I haven't tried any of the other choices.

Before I give up outright and demand a refund (which I won't get) I'll try the out-and-out backup-everything-and-the-kitchen-sink. That really will take hours even if it runs properly. This system currently shows 138G used on both partitions. I don't know if the program will allow me to exclude any of that, or if it's all-or-nothing, but I bet it is indeed all-or-nothing.

And I bet that won't work, either. It'll try to store the same things as the sys-state backup did, and it'll lock up just like that did.

Must I buy a Norton product after all, after wasting $50 on TrueImage? Backup should be a system function. Microsoft should have provided me with a comprehensive backup solution. But the system "backup" program included in Vista also cannot archive the system state.

That's two in a row for me now, after the paid version of Zoom Player turned out not to display subtitles for DVDs, and thus turned out to be utterly useless for my purposes (in as much as I don't watch fansubs routinely). I wonder if I can make it three? There's a new version of Flash Decompiler, much enhanced, that I have to pay for as an upgrade. I wonder if I should risk it?

I don't like getting ripped off.

UPDATE: Is there a black cloud hovering over my head or something? The new version of Flash Decompiler doesn't work, either. Every SWF file it sees, it reports as corrupted. Including the one it installed itself, which it tries to autoload when it runs.

UPDATE: Probably the problem is that the previous version of it is already on my computer. I'll try uninstalling both of them, and then installing the new one, and see if that makes any difference.

But tomorrow. I've had enough teeth gnashing for one day. (There was a time when I had a greater tolerance for this kind of frustration. But I just don't have a lot of energy any more.)

UPDATE: I let it do a backup of the C partition last night. It seems to have worked fine. The resulting file is 66 gigabytes. Whether it can actually be used to restore my system state is something I pretty much can only discover when I need it, after some hypothetical crash, but it's the best I can do for now.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 06:59 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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