Re: Auto-saving the registry

Rob Kennedy wrote:
>
> The whole thing? That could be hundreds of megabytes. All because you're
> not sure whether your code works correctly?

Is the situation really that bad nowadays, the Registry file could be
hundreds of megabytes? I have never seen such a beast yet (knock,
knock).

I wonder what there is stored in those cases. Almost looks like someone
would be using Registry as replacement for some simple Access database
or something.

Most of the time, I avoid writing any application settings or almost
anything to Registry. I prefer the old ascii based INI files in this
case, and store them to the same sub directory with my application.

I think that ascii storage is coming back anyway, in the form of XML
files. Even the next version of MS-Office will be using XML-format as
the primary storage.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2005/jun05/06-01XMLFileFormat.mspx

> The registry isn't some delicate thing that could break if you look at
> it wrong.

I think that the registry may easily get corrupted. Even if you do not
touch it at all:) Several drivers, application settings, service packs
etc. can make such changes to Registry that Windows won't start any
more. Of course there are those built-in restore points for trying to
restore Registry, but sometimes even these won't help.

Anyway, I would pretend that I wholly trust to those built in restore
mechanisms. And if the restoring fails, tell the customer that all this
catastrophe is Microsoft's fault again:)
Writing my own routines to backup and restore the whole Registry in
usual application installations is overkill.

Justin
.

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