Hi,

well, that was one of the first things I was considering. Here in Jamaica 
where i live (though I am a German) is no company offering such recovery 
services, I would have to send the harddrive by mail to a location in the US 
(they are the closest where you could find such companies) and hope the 
harddrive will arrive (not a guarantee here in Jamaica).

But even so, such recovery services are immensily expensive. And meanwhile, 
with all the file operations on that harddrive, their space must have been 
overwritten many times.

Yes, of course it was my own fault to have my own ideas where I want to 
store my files. But that all wouldn't have happened if POV-Ray's installer 
wouldn't move around my own files. That is the cause for my fault, I would 
think. And yes, I agree, the POV-Ray's installer needs to be smarter, as 
mentioned in the previous postings of other newsgroup members. Remember, 
what we do here is not to say "Your Fault", "My Fault", what we try to do 
here is to give constructive suggestions to make things better and saver, 
and more user-friendly.



"Christian Froeschlin" <chr### [at] chrfrde> wrote in message 
news:4aad40f0$1@news.povray.org...
> You should be aware that they probably can still be brought back.
> If they are important enough to you, I'd recommend to stop using your
> hard disk immediately and bring in to a professional recovery service.

Post a reply to this message

Thorsten Froehlich wrote:

> Tell Microsoft. It has been explained numerous times around here (and 
> elsewhere) that Vista does not always provide access to the programs 
> folder, so POV-Ray had to be changed to be compatible with Vista. You 
> should ask yourself why you didn't provide POV-Ray's installer with the 
> privileges to install in that very folder? - In fact your whole account 
> of what happens make little sense in that regard.

Which reminds me, why doesn't POV-Ray's installer bring up the UAC 
prompt when you tell it to install for all users?

-- 
~Mike

Post a reply to this message

Sven Littkowski <Sve### [at] jamaica-focuscom> wrote:
> Remember, 
> what we do here is not to say "Your Fault", "My Fault", what we try to do 
> here is to give constructive suggestions to make things better and saver, 
> and more user-friendly.

  You also have to understand that if you keep extremely important files
in your hard disk, some of them for so long that they are even from the
DOS days, and you don't understand the concept of backupping, you are
*asking* to lose those files one day or another.

  The fact is: If you don't backup a file in your hard disk, you are
accepting that you will lose that file at any moment with no possibility
of recovering it. This is simply a fact of life and physics. Hardware will
break (it's not a question of "if", but "when"), accidents can happen,
buggy software can happen. *Anything* can happen which will destroy those
files. That's why backupping is so important if you really need to make sure
you don't lose some files.

  And "backupping" does not mean copying a file to another place in the
same hard disk or even the same computer. It means copying (by whatever
means you want) to a completely separate media (such as a DVD-R or whatever)
and keeping it safe (so that if an accident happens, it will only affect
either the computer or the backup media, but unlikely both at the same time).

  (And if the files are really important, you can't trust one single backup.
Like with the computer, storage media can degrade, break of suffer from
accidents, and sometimes this can happen without notice. This means that
if the hard disk gets damaged or otherwise the original files get lost so
that you would need to recover them from the backup media, it might have
happened that the backup media has broken as well. Again, this is simply a
fact of life and physics.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

Mike Raiford wrote:
> Which reminds me, why doesn't POV-Ray's installer bring up the UAC 
> prompt when you tell it to install for all users?

Maybe the UAC prompt needs to be approved by a UAC prompt before it can be 
shown ;-)

	Thorsten

PS: I could guess this might have to do with signing the code, but really 
with Windos, who knows :-(

Post a reply to this message

Mike Raiford wrote:

> Which reminds me, why doesn't POV-Ray's installer bring up the UAC 
> prompt when you tell it to install for all users?

I don't think you can elevate the privileges of an application
that is already running. The installer could indeed have a manifest
to specify it needs administrator privileges - or have a recognized
name such as setup.exe or install.exe ;) - in which cases the UAC
would pop up on startup. Or, actually, this *could* be so if the
installer were an executable and not an MSI package, which is
itself rather strange for an end user application.

In any case, such a manifest would not allow the (rather unusual)
installation option of POV-Ray for "single user" w/o privileges.

It would probably be possible to split the installer into
two parts and extract and spawn the second part from the first
with request for privileges, but realistically ... not.

Post a reply to this message

On Tue, 15 Sep 2009 03:34:39 +0200, Christian Froeschlin <chr### [at] chrfrde>  
wrote:
> The installer could indeed have a manifest
> to specify it needs administrator privileges - or have a recognized
> name such as setup.exe or install.exe ;) - in which cases the UAC
> would pop up on startup. Or, actually, this *could* be so if the
> installer were an executable and not an MSI package, which is
> itself rather strange for an end user application.

MSI packages can also be marked for UAC.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163486.aspx#S6



-- 
FE

Post a reply to this message

Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
> I agree that the naming of that folder, rooted in the 8 character DOS length 
> limit is not ideal any more. Probably it should be named "Samples Scenes" or 
> "Example Scenes" or if it should be shorted just "Examples".

  Would it be possible in Windows to make this directory read-only (and
make sure that if the user tries to render a scene from that directory,
the resulting image is written somewhere else)?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

On Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:13:53 -0500, Mike Raiford <"m[raiford]!at"@gmail.com>
wrote:

>Which reminds me, why doesn't POV-Ray's installer bring up the UAC 
>prompt when you tell it to install for all users?

For me it is because the only way that I can install Pov 3.7 is to switch UAC
off!
-- 

Regards
     Stephen

Post a reply to this message

Yes, I totally agree with you. I know a long time about the relative 
shortlivingness of all storage media. DVDs and CDs don't last long, a few 
years only. Also, with all the files I am working on, I would have to make 
new partial backups EACH DAY! Uhh!   :-)

Let's hope, the glorious POV-Ray team will make the installer smarter, at 
least for all Windows versions and otherOSs which are not Windows Vista...


"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote in message 
news:4aae86ac@news.povray.org...
> Like with the computer, storage media can degrade, break of suffer from
> accidents, and sometimes this can happen without notice.
>                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

Stephen wrote:

> For me it is because the only way that I can install Pov 3.7 is to switch UAC
> off!

I was able to install it for me only, with UAC enabled, but I would like 
to be able to use the "All Users" option as I do with most other software.


-- 
~Mike

Post a reply to this message