Thank You Toucan / 7Zip, and of course PortableApps...

A successful restore from backup today following the crash of a USB drive. Here is a description of the process. When I first started with Toucan just a few weeks ago, something of this sort would have been helpful...

Backup regimen:

- Five rotating backups.
- A new backup at the end of each day.
- Backup goes to a second local USB drive.
- Backup is scripted as a BAT file, and is based the script described in the Help file (which would not work in earlier Toucan versions; I would assume that problem has been fixed).
- Not yet using encryption.
- Am passing a password.
- Backup compression is Zip.

Restore Description:

- The backup is 20 megs -- too large to extract using the Windows XP implementation of Zip. A different tool is needed...
- 7Zip is the "engine" of Toucan. Therefore, I installed 7Zip to drive C and ran the 7Zip restore function.
- Since the backup was of an entire drive, I extracted the most recent backup (backup1) to the root of a new USB drive.
- Everything restored without a hitch in 40 minutes. It was not even necessary to disconnect / reconnect the drive or reboot the PC to access all the emails, the browser, and client files...

Planned enhancements to the backup regimen (opinions?):

- Incremental backups combined with the backup rotation, to reduce wear on the USB drives.
- FTP backups to an external server.

Again, thank you to the developers of PortableApps (John Haller), Toucan (Steve Lamberton), 7Zip, and J Neutron who helped clarify Toucan usage.