&xwp;: "Archives" Page Replacement

&xwp; replaces the default "Archives" page with an enhanced version if the respective setting has been enabled in the "&xwp; Setup" object. On this page, you may set detailed criteria for whether your Desktop should be backed up at Desktop startup.

In order to restore an archive which has been created by the Workplace Shell archiving mechanism, press Alt-F1 while the small white "&os2short;" text box is displayed at system bootup.

Please see the &xwp; User Guide for an introduction to this feature. Again, this enhanced page does not modify the archiving mechanism itself; it only determines whether archiving is enabled, according to the criteria you specify here.

The "Archive Desktop" setting determines whether &xwp; will perform any archiving at all.

If that setting is enabled, you may influence in detail when your Desktop should be backed up. Note that all these checks are only performed while the Desktop is starting up. You will therefore have to restart the Desktop to see any changes:

"At every Desktop startup" does exactly the same as the generic backup setting on the old WPS "Archives" page. If this is enabled, the Desktop will be backed up every time it starts up.

If "At every Desktop startup" is checked, the Desktop will be backed up every time it starts up. This is the same behavior as with OS/2 Warp.

"At next Desktop startup only" will back up the Desktop exactly once. After the next Desktop startup, this setting will be disabled again automatically.

"If INI files have changed..." will go over the OS2.INI and OS2SYS.INI files during Desktop startup and compute a number of checksums to find out how much the contents of these files have changed. If that computation exceeds the percentage you specify with this setting, your Desktop will be backed up automatically.

Useful values for this are between 0.5 and 5 percent. If you specify very low values, your Desktop might be backed up at every startup also.

"Every xxx days" will simply check when the last archive was created; if more than the number of days which you have specified have passed, your Desktop will be backed up.

Note that this only checks the pure calendar date, not the amount of time (e.g. hours) which have passed. If you restart the Desktop one minute after midnight, your Desktop may be backed up, even if it has been backed up just before midnight already.

The "Show status at bootup" setting determines whether &xwp; displays another status window while the Desktop is starting up, which displays the results of the aforementioned computations. This might be useful for testing your settings.

"Keep xxx archives" lets you specify how many archives are kept by the Desktop in the archives directory tree. This defaults to 3, but you may keep up to 9 archives, theoretically. However, if this number exceeds 3, the standard screen which comes up when you press Alt-F1 during system startup will be partly unreadable, because the additional archives information will make the top scroll off the screen. This doesn't hurt, it just looks ugly.

If Display at each system startup is selected, the system automatically displays the Recovery Choices screen each time it starts, and you do not have to press Alt-F1 during boot to display it.

Use Timeout to specify how long the system is to display the Recovery Choices screen during startup. You cannot specify a value if "Display at each system startup" is deselected.

You can specify a time limit from 0 to 999 seconds. If you select 0, the system will not start until you enter a choice on the Recovery Choices screen. If you select a timeout value between 1 and 999, the system displays the Recovery Choices screen until the number of seconds you specified has elapsed or until you enter your recovery option, whichever comes first. If the time limit elapses before you enter a recovery option, the system continues to start using the current system files.