Daily Cup of Tech

Brian has just finished reading HowTo Backup a Registry Key and wants to know how he can distinguish different registry keys apart.

Tim,

Again thanks for the great newsletter.

I am sure I am in the group of your least tech knowledgeable subscribers, and consequently, I patiently await each posting to see what new secrets I can learn from you.

For example, I have been making registry backup of the entire registry and when I read, “How To Backup a Registry Key”, I was amazed and excited to learned how to backup just the needed part of the registry!!

However, this causes a new issue: knowing exactly what the partial back up is.
When backing up the entire registry I would simply save the file as: RegBkUp07-03-01.reg and knew it would replace the entire registry as of that date.

Consequently, I know am wondering how to identify a partial back up .reg file.
The reg key file name would be to long to be used in the file name.
So I was thinking I could put a note in the file itself I could open the .reg file with notepad and reveal exactly what I had backed up.

Having read many other of your posting about scripting, I think this could probably be done quite easily, but I don’t know how to go about it.

So I am thinking that there are others out there that would appreciate a quick lesson on how to accomplish this. If so, you could add to, not only my knowledge, but also to some other readers.
Thanks for the great newsletter and sharing you knowledge with us.

Brian

Thanks for the kind praise, Brian.

As for your question, all of the information that you are looking for is already available. If you open up the REG file with a text editor such as Notepad, you will see that the registry key that you are backing up is in the third line. As for the date that it was created, if you right click on the REG file and click on Properties, you will see the date that the file was created.

While you are in the properties page, there is also a Summary tab. In there, you can put file meta data. This is information that is stored in the file system but is not a part of the file itself. This could be a really good place to store information about the REG file.

Another option for storing information is in the file itself. You can create a comment by opening up the REG file in a text editor. Then, you can create a new line that starts with a semicolon (;). Any line that starts with ; will be ignored by the registry program so you can put anything you want in that line.

Now, I have a small gift for the truly lazy. I have created RegInfo. This is a small utility that will allow you to select a registry file and tell you when the registry file was created and what registry key it backs up.

To use RegInfo, simply drop any REG file on it or double click on the program and browse to a REG file of your choosing.

Hopefully, this will prove to be helpful, Brian.

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