Desktop? What Desktop? Here are solutions for both Windows and IBM Lotus Notes that help you save and restore your icon configurations more easily.
Windows
Windows Desktop Icon Save and Restore has saved me a lot of frustration with the Windows Desktop. Every time I switched resolutions for a web or beamer presentation, the windows desktop got messed up. (Windows) Desktop Desktop Icon Save and Restore allows you to save one desktop configuration for every resolution used – I haven’t tried this with additional monitors (extended Windows desktop), but assume that it will simply store the layout for the total resolution of 2+ monitors then.
For Lotus Notes I only know of the following two approaches:
Lotus Notes from out of the box
From out of the box all you can do is backup your entire desktop.dsk/desktop5.dsk/desktop6.ndk/desktop8.ndk (to come 😀). Zipping it up saves you a lot of diskspace.
A rollback is nothing more than a simple manual filecopy (and unzip) when needed.
For roaming, Lotus Notes/Domino offers a roaming feature from out of the box, but that does not allow for a restore.
Lotus Notes with panagenda MarvelClient
MarvelClient just stores the icon configuration of the Lotus Notes desktop file as XML – the result is a file with just a few KB as opposed to the many MB the desktop file can grow to on disk.
In “the old days” of Notes 5, this would mean that unread marks would not be part of the XML – however, in Notes 6 and up, unread marks are no longer stored in the Notes desktop, but in each databases itself.
Said XML file can be used for onetime rollback of a Notes client configuration or roaming even – so instead of roaming several MB (even if zipped), a small XML file with just a few KB (five (5) at average if zipped) is roamed when a roaming incident occurs. The current roaming solution in MarvelClient can backup, rollback and roam an entire client configuration with no more than a 2 MB network footprint and network traffic, which includes the following files by default: all ID files, notes.ini, local “names.nsf” (as a 1:1 zip to ensure document unique IDs and replica ID to remain unchanged), all bookmarks and desktop icons (both as XML).
We are currently in the process of designing an extended backup, rollback and roaming solution where any combinations of source-files and target directories and/or databases can be freely specified – more on this later.
If you use a different backup, restore/rollback or roaming approach, why not share some details here?
