by Justin Gehring on May 14, 2012
I’d like to draw everyone’s attention to one of the more important folders on a Windows machine. It’s one of those that you don’t normally see, and if you don’t back it up, you will come to regret it.
The folder is known as the “Application Data” folder, and in Windows 7 is located at:
C:\Users\Justin Gehring\AppData
This folder contains data used in your applications, and many times, it’s extremely important data. (Many times, it’s also not important at all). Some things you can often find in this folder include:
- Your email inbox and folders (Both Thunderbird and Outlook put their local folder storage in here)
- Settings files for your FTP Clients/etc that may store important configuration details you’ve long since forgotten.
- Some software programs store their license keys here.
- If you use Bitcoin, your wallet is often stored in here (which without, you’ll lose all your bitcoins in a crash).
- Log files for programs such as Skype are also stored here.
When backing up your data, I strongly encourage backing up EVERYTHING in the C:\Users Folder… even those pesky temp files. Don’t make the mistake of backing up just your My Documents folder… It’s not enough!
Backblaze of course does this automatically (If you haven’t caught that from my previous posts).
by Justin Gehring on May 14, 2012
Anytime I rebuild my PC, I tend to start asking myself if it’s time to upgrade any other components in my system. I don’t need to have the fastest system in the world, but I do like to be as productive as possible, and not fall behind the curve. At the moment, I’m still where I liked to be, which is surprising considering my computer is 3+ years old. In fact, not only is is still keeping me fairly happy, but it’s also still outclocking most of the other computers in my life. Just to summarize what’s in it at the moment:
- An I7 2.6 Ghz Quad Core processor (this is the component showing it’s age these days).
- 12 GB of Triple Channel Ram 1066mghz
- Nvidia GeForce 260 with 1GB Vid Ram (This is also showing it’s age, but gaming isn’t the highest priority for me anymore, so it’s still handling everything I want to play… Namely WoW and Diablo 3 starting next week).
- Over 8 TB of Hard drives in Raid 1 (so over 4TB Usable).
- Over 300GB in SSD all running well over the 500MB/second line thanks to 2 very high end raid cards (Adaptec 6805 anyone?)
That said, it took Intel until just recently to upgrade the “Enthusiast” line of processors. But now that they have, I’m seriously tempted to replace my motherboard, processor, and ram (I’d probably still wait on the graphics card). What would that get me? Well…
- SIX cores with HT running at 3.2Ghz… Oh the video rendering time would be amazing…
- Probably either 16GB of Quad Channel Ram or 32GB… not really sure.
- Faster Bus and Memory speeds, with Native Sata6 and USB3 support (although my raid card does sata6 already, so I’m good there)
- More PCIe x16 Slots (not needed… yet… but if I upgrade my graphics cards they will be).
Really though, it’s the processor speed that I’m bringing into question. The sad part is, that a majority of the video rendering that I do is in a program called Camtasia. Camtasia hasn’t added support for more than 2 cores yet, which makes additional cores pointless for now. I don’t stand to gain much other than MGHZ, (which I could probably get now simply by over clocking). So that is probably my decision right there for now… Maybe Christmas will bring a JR bonus of a faster machine… Until then, I’ll just have to sit in awe of 6 core machines.