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:
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.
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.
"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.