Mickey$oft got a particular egg in the face with the release of Windows XP. The same day as the "official" release they posted a rather large set of "fixes." My recollection is that it was 13 separate fixes, totalling some 20 MB.

Each of the fixes included a warning that you should backup your system before installing the fix, and included detailed instructions on how to do so.

A subsequent release admitted that the backup didn't work, and you could not restore anything from it. So far as I know, that's the first (and perhaps only) time the word "restore" has been seen in a Mickey$oft publication.

As a "typical" example, the Win2K Pro Resource Kit includes 87 index entries for "backup." Since it's also available on CD, it was pretty easy to confirm that "restore," "recover," and "replace" do not appear in its 1764 pages.

Mickey gives detailed instructions for backing up email from Outlook and Outlook Express, that say you can just copy the folders after you've "compacted" them. They do not ever say that you need to copy the "index" folder and keep it with them. The "import" function you have to assume you would use to get them back will often not be able to recover them without the index folder. (There's a workaround, but you have to invent it yourself.)

John