Overview

 

Personal computers have become so reliable that it's easy to get complacent about backing up your files. In reality, catastrophic data loss, either because your hard drive crashed or you accidentally deleted something you hadn't intended to, is never a question of if but when. And when it does happen, and it will, reconstructing the information is

•child's play if you remembered to back it up,

•a mind-numbing chore even if you do have it on paper,

•a nightmare if it vanished into thin air.

With flash drives now selling for the price of three Big Macs and a bucket of KFC chicken, please back up your Morning Flight data files. Religiously. We may be able to help with a corrupted file. Nobody can help you if your file is en route to another galaxy.

 

How to back up

 

Let's start with how not to. Backing up to a drive on the same computer is like trying to protect your good china from earthquakes by moving the cabinet into the next room. Backing up to an external drive is a step in the right direction but also not far enough. Your irreplaceable data is still in the same house, at risk from fires, floods, meteorites.

A better solution is to keep one flash drive off-site, and another plugged into the computer. Keep it one-button easy, or else you're not going to back up often enough. Now and then, archive everything to DVD. When disaster strikes, even a month-old backup is better than no backup at all.

 

What to back up under XP

 

Theoretically, the only thing you need to back up are your Morning Flight data files. You can always reinstall the program by downloading a new setup file. But because the application itself has such a small footprint (less than 16MB), the quickest and safest way is to simply back up the entire "MorningFlight" folder.

 

 

 

What to back up under Windows 7, 8, 10, and Vista

 

If you installed Morning Flight outside the "Program Files" folder or have disabled Windows UAC Virtualization, the procedure is the same as the one for XP. However, if you installed Morning Flight into the recommended path inside the Program Files folder (C:\Program Files\Printfire\MorningFlight by default) and you're running it with UAC enabled, backing up the Morning Flight folder would be pointless. That's because the files that need backing up aren't there. The operating system has taken it upon itself to relocate them all to the Compatibility Files folder.
 
Some Background

There is a fair amount of confusion over UAC, which has gained notoriety for annoying the user with constant permission prompts. That's something we'll learn to live with. Security usually comes with a price tag. Look no further than the long check-in lines at airports.

More insidious is a new UAC feature called Virtualization. The idea is to accommodate applications that write to files in protected directories. "C:/Program Files" is such a directory. This is so common that Microsoft felt it necessary to devise a mechanism that redirects the write operation to a user-specific location. The application thinks it's writing to the main Program Files directory, but in reality a file gets written to a second Program Files directory in each user's Virtual Store.
 
Windows 7

So far, so good. In Windows 7, the Morning Flight data files become readily visible when you open the Morning Flight folder, then single-click 'Compatibility files'.
 

 

Windows 8 and 10

Comes now Windows 8 and 10, where the Compatibility files link has apparently gone the way of the Start button. The folder is still there, but Microsoft thought it best to hide it from us. We're happy they didn't move it. The virtual store is in the same place in Windows 8 and 10 as it is in Windows 7.

If UAC (User Access Control) is turned off, the data files will be in the same folder as the Morning Flight .exe file (MFlightP.exe for the Passport Edition, MFlightG.exe for the Gold, etc.)

 
To locate the Morning Flight data files in Windows 8 and 10, navigate to the Compatibility Files folder as follows:
 

32 bits: C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Printfire\MorningFlight

64 bits: C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\Printfire\MorningFlight
 

If you're unsure about how to get there, download 'Search Everything,' a free and indispensable utility from Voidtools. Ask it to find "ACTFile.TPS" for you. The first time you use the program, it will take a minute or two to index. Subsequent searches will be much quicker.

 

 

•Right-click ACTFile.TPS in Search Everything, then select 'Copy Path to Clipboard'

•Paste the path into the Windows search box and press Enter

•The search results will show as 'MorningFlight' (the Compatibility Files folder)

•Double-click it to open the folder
 

Backing up - Step by Step
 

First, open the "Compatibility Files" folder and select all the files in that folder. Those are the data files that need to be backed up at the end of each day. The files in the Morning Flight folder are static program files that don't really need backing up, but you may want to do so at least once. In an emergency, they can always be reinstalled from the setup file.

To copy all the compatibility files to the Windows Clipboard, hold down the Shift key and click on ACTFile.TPS. Then, without letting go of the Shift key, scroll down and click on the last file in the folder. All the files should now be highlighted. Release the Shift key and press Ctrl-C.

 

 

 

On both backup drives (the one you keep at home, and the one with your computer), create a separate folder for each workday. Before you shut down, copy the entire "MorningFlight" folder (for XP) or all the files in the "Compatibility Files" folder (for Windows 7, 8, 10 and Vista, if Morning Flight is installed in the Program Files path) into the folder of the day. Overwrite what's there from the previous week. The older a backup gets, the less useful it is.

At the end of the week, swap drives. On Friday evening, take the office drive home. On Monday morning, bring the home drive back to the office. Worst case scenario? Your surviving backup could be five days old. Even if your house burned down over the weekend and both drives went up in flames along with it, chances are, your original files would still be intact on your desktop at the office.