But I see Windows 11 goes to the opposite direction of hiding more "advanced" options from the context menu. (I would like for windows to add "assign fixed drive letter" to the context menu of each drive (instead of having to type commands or use the storage manager) to let "normal" users use that scheme. And that's pretty much the way you use drive letters. Like AA: to ZZ: for fixed drives, A: to Z: for removable drives, etc. In hindsight, we should probably leave more letters before the system drive. So I think Microsoft saw this problem but there is no systematic backward-compatible way to fix it. But the letter will change if I plug some other drive without the G: drive, and C:~ F: is taken, the G: will no longer be G. Windows seems to recognize the drive ID, for example, if I have a harddrive that's assigned G:, as long as the G: letter is vacant, it's always G: after re-plugging. But now A: and B: have been taken, and they don't wish to change the system drive to a new letter other than C:, so they choose to append each drive to the last letter that's not currently used.Īnd now with USB hard drives, mounting drives after boot, hot-swapping hard drive bays, network drives, etc, the problem got more chaotic. When flash drives came, one can connect as many drives at the same time as they want. It would be ridiculous to store a disk ID on each floppy disk and assign a new letter to each new floppy disk. The hard drives are mostly fixed, and all floppy disks use one single drive ( A:). Happy to see BackBlaze is actively evolving to meet the customers' needs.įor the reason that the OS doesn't assign unique drive letters to each drive, I personally think it's probably an inherited design.īack in the days of the floppy disks, it was pretty rare for the OS to see a new drive. (The Mac mounts drives based on a "name" of the drive, not a letter.) The equivalent on the Macintosh is I name my drives "Photos" and "Movies". I happen to leave "D:\" and "E:\" open for transient things (that are not backed up) like USB thumb drives I attach. My "Photos" are on "P:" and my "Movies" are on "M:", etc. Personally I ALWAYS run Windows with fixed drive letters. I must be missing a use case here, because both the OS manufacturer does this, and customers are also asking for it. Stepping back for a minute, I'm still trying to figure out two things:ġ) Why doesn't the Operating System do this for all of us? Why aren't drive letters more "sticky"? It might be related to the answer to #2 below.Ģ) What is the use case where you never know what your drive letters are and they "shuffle" on you? So you must always open the top level folder and "eyeball" which drive is which based on the contents? It just seems error prone to me, what if you type a command, and right before you run the command the drive letters shuffle to new drive letters? What if the drive you THINK is connected is not connected and it is a different drive, and you have no way to tell because you call all external drives "D:" for "Drive"? Or show the complete history of each time the drive changed drive letter. I suppose as long as the drive has never changed drive letters it could be presented the current way, and if the drive is CONSTANTLY changing we could show it the way you suggest. That's actually a good interface, I was trying to imagine how to communicate to customers that what is CLEARLY currently attached to their desktop as D:\ is showing up in the web interface as E:\ and the "last seen as E:" is pretty good. (Last seen as E:, 1.6TB removable):/images/IMG0001.jpg And maybe show the drive as something like this when needed: This isn't a big problem but I would like BackBlaze to store the characteristic of the volume (like a generate random ID or something) instead of only a drive letter. How would you tell them apart when you go to restore if you don't know the drive letter? I don't know how to specify a file other that the file path, which includes the drive letter. Is that what you are suggesting? That could get difficult when you have 10 million images. Most people do that with a filename path like: I'm open to suggestions, but I'm totally baffled as to what you would want? When you go to restore a file, you have to specify the file. It's annoying to have to assigned static letters to each hard drive.įirst, you can read about how to do that here, it isn't difficult: Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze and wrote the code that backs up files based on drive letter.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |