File History - Alternate to Memeo WD Anywhere backup

Hello All,

After windows 8.1 upgrade, just like you, I ran into WD Memeo Backup incompatibility issues. I tried bunch of options to get it to work but failed and got only one message "WD Anywhere Backup cannot be run under this version of windows" and Memeo does not have any plans to extend support for this version of backup software.

Solution

I tried couple of options, like FreeFileSync, Synkronizer etc, to get my backup plan up and running but finally settled down with Windows 8.1 "File History" program. It's bit messy in terms of setting up, unless you know "how it does". But once you get it right you will be happy that you do not have to reply on any third party program and worry about any installation/un-installation.

I am listing out steps which will help you to set your backup.

Few concepts before we proceed.

1. "File History" program manages backing up files using your "library folders".
2. By default it will backup all Library Folders(My Documents, My Music, My Videos etc), Desktop, Contacts, and couple of more items including One Drive(only offline files).
3. You can setup "exclude list" to exclude any folders that you might want to be part of backup.
4. Setup Network Folder from your WD Network Hard Disk.
5. Few "Advanced Setting" options to set frequency and version.

Let's get to work !!!

Note: By Default all libraries(Default and Custom) will get selected for backup. So do not set "File History" to ON unless you have all exclude list setup(as in Step 2) to avoid unnecessary files to be part of backup plan.

Step 1 (optional): Setup a new Library Folder and have folders listed in it that you want to be part of backup plan.

• As shown in below image, open Explorer, Right click on "Documents" -> Include In Library -> "Create new library"
• Provide a name for your library
• New Library folder will get listed under Homegroup as shown in picture below.

Create Library Folder

• Now under manage tab, click on "Manage Library" folder.
• Add folders that you want to be the part of backup plan.
• That's it setting up your Library Folder.

Step 2: Press Windows key from your desktop and key in "File History" for search and select "File History" and Setup "Exclude Folders"

Launch File History

File History

Step 3: Network Directory share.

• Create new share or use already existing share from your WD Network Hard Drive.
• Open WD Drive in explorer, and you will list of all shared folders.
• Right Click on desired backup folder and click on "Map Network Drive"

Step 4: From Start Menu, search for "File History" and go to "File History Settings"
Turn On "File History" and Select newly mapped network drive.

File History Settings

And your backup process should commence !!!

Step 5: Configure frequency and version settings
Open the "File History" window as mentioned in step 2, and goto "Advanced  Setting" options and make necessary changes.

Once a cycle of backup completes, you can clear your memeo backup files and un-install memeo backup program.

That's all folks !!! :)

Thanks.

Apache Lucene - Brief Concept & Code Snippet

Searching ... a simple concept with a complex algorithms. That's how I see it. Always fascinated by the complexity and wanted to implement and use some sort of basic algorithms.
So I end using Apache's Lucene library to for search functionality. In this post I will walk through on some basic terminology/concept of this library along with small code snippets to initialize and make use of this library.

Lucene - it is text based search library. To built up an index source information could be anything a database, file system or web sites. You can feed in info from any source you like to index.

Data is indexed by Lucene using "Inverted Indexing" technique. That means it will "retrieves the pages related to a keyword instead of searching a pages for a keyword".

On Apache's website there are below two things are available for downloads

• Lucene - It is an engine which can be used by programmers to customize searches.
• Solr - It's a war file can be used by non-programmers. It can be directly deployed on tomcat, jetty or any web server.

Lucene Concepts

• Document - It is unit of search/index. Just like a row when we fire sql queries.
• Fields - A document is consist of one of more fields. Columns in a row.
• Searching - It is done using "QueryParser" class
• Queries - It has its own mini language. It does have ability to add weightage to fields, known as boosting.
• Building Indexes - To build index lucene needs a directory on file system where information can be stored. While indexing records, we need to specify 
• what all fields needs to be stored and 
• what all fields needs to be indexed.
• Directory - FSDirectory is the abstract class which points to the index directory. It has direct sub-classes. I have listed down below.
• It is recommended to let lucene pick up implementation class based on environment.
• SimpleFSDirectory - Poor for concurrent performace
• NIOFSDirectory - Poor choice for windows
• MMapDirectory - It has some issue with JRE bug.
• RAMDirectory - It cannot handle huge indexes.
• There are few more implementation classes provided by lucene which can be easily located in java docs provided by lucene

Coming to to coding part.

• Index Directory

File idxFile = new File(INDEX_DIR); //e.g. /work/index/
Directory idxDir = FSDirectory.open(idxFile);

• Prepare Analyzer

Map<String, Analyzer> map = new HashMap<String, Analyzer>(): //key, Analyzer pair
map.put(FILE_NAME, new StandardAnalyzer(Version.LUCENE_36));
Analyzer analyzer = new PerFieldAnalyzerWrapper(new StandardAnalyzer(Version.LUCENE_36), map);

• Index Writer Configuration

Config = new IndexWriterConfig(Version.LUCENE_36, analyzer);

• Index Writer

new IndexWriter(idxDir, config);

Before we go further let's take quick peek on Analyzer.

• It builds up token streams.
• A policy for extracting index terms from text.
• Subclasses
• PerFieldAnalyzerWrapper
• ReusableAnalyzerBase
• PatternAnalyzer
• KeywordAnalyzer
• PatternAnalyzer

Moving forward with code snippets to 

• Create documents to be stored in index.

Field fPath = new Field(FULL_PATH, path, Field.Store.YES , Field.Index.toIndex(true, true, false));
document.add(fPath); // Add a field to document. Keep on multiple fields that needs to be stored.

• Add document to index

indexWriter.addDocument(document);

Fine tune above process to build index. Once indexes ready, lets gear up for searching...

• Initialize index directory

IndexReader ir = IndexReader.open(idxDir);
IndexSearcher searcher = new IndexSearcher(ir);

• Prepare fields analyzers

Map map = new HashMap();
map.put(FILE_NAME, new StandardAnalyzer(Version.LUCENE_36));
Analyzer analyzer = new PerFieldAnalyzerWrapper(new StandardAnalyzer(Version.LUCENE_36), map);

• Query Parser

QueryParser qp = new MultiFieldQueryParser(Version.LUCENE_36, new String[]{FILE_NAME, TITLE, ALBUM, ARTIST}, analyzer);// FILE_NAME, TITLE, ALBUM, ARTIST are the fields of Document used in my example
Query query = qp.parse(srchText); //pass in the search keyword
TopDocs res = searcher.search(query, 10);

• Iterate through results

for(ScoreDoc sc:res.scoreDocs) {

Document doc = searcher.doc(sc.doc);

sc.doc //Gives Document ID

doc.getFieldable(FILE_NAME).stringValue(); // Read Field Value

}

Hope this helps implementation get rolling quickly. 

Thanks !!!

CSV Excel - Double Click Issue

So here I am again, with a fix for another issue which I tried to resolve with my colleague the other day.

Problem Statement:
We used CSVWriter to write CSV file's and on double clicking it; excel was not showing the special characters, to be precise korean characters. However if we were opening the same file in Notepad characters were rendering properly.

Issue:
The CSV file was getting generated without BOM(Byte Order Mark). BOM is nothing but the Unicode character used to signal the byte order of the text file or stream. Its code point is U+FEFF. BOM use is optional, and, if used, should appear at the start of the text stream

I detected this issue when I opened the file in Notepad++ and found "UTF8 without BOM" option was selected under "Format" menu. I then changed the format to "UTF8" and saved a copy of the file. Double click the file and Excel rendered all the korean characters.

Click here to read more on Byte Order Mark.

Fix:
We added below mentioned three statements to have BOM character at the start of the file. That's it.

OutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream("c:/test.csv");
//Write BOM Characters
fos.write(239); //0xEF
fos.write(187); //0xBB
fos.write(191); //0xBF

PrintWriter writer = new PrintWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(fos, "UTF-8"));
//Write all the required contents.

writer.close();
fos.close();

Thanks !!!