&xwp; replaces the default "Archives" page with an enhanced version if the respective setting has been enabled in the "&xwp; Setup" object. On this page, you may set detailed criteria for whether your Desktop should be backed up at Desktop startup.

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:

The "Show status at bootup" setting determines whether &xwp; displays another status window while the Desktop is starting up, which displays the results of the aforementioned computations. This might be useful for testing your settings.

"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.