I received a call today from someone who reported that she had started
compressing a QuickBooks file, since she wanted to upload the data to
Intuit's site (QuickBooks 2013 provides a "condense" function that is
accessible from the File menu by choosing Utilities then
Condense data), but during the process of removing old entries from
many years ago the company owner needed her to do some work in QuickBooks
so she terminated the compression operation. As soon as she told me
that I suspected she was calling because by doing so the company file
had been corrupted. That seemed to be the case, because she said she
could no longer find any entries in the file for this year besides those
for today. She thought that the QuickBooks data was being backed up to
an external, USB-attached disk drive on her system, but when I checked
its contents I found that the last backup to that drive had occurred a
couple of years ago.
Fortunately the data was stored on a Microsoft Windows system running a
version of Windows that uses Microsoft's
Volume Snapshot Service
, which allows you to simply right-click on a file or folder name,
choose Properties and then click on the Previous Versions tab
and select from shadow copies of the file or folder that were made
previously, though in this case I didn't even need to do that.
If you want to obtain information on the internal and external drives
attached to a Microsoft windows system from a command line prompt, you
can use the wmic command. To view just the model number
for drives, you can use wmic diskdrive get model.
c:\>wmic diskdrive get Model
Model
ST31000528AS
ST6000DX000-1H217Z
Generic- Multi-Card USB Device
WD My Book 1230 USB Device
c:\>
You can also use wmic diskdrive get Name, Manufacturer, Model
to get the name of the drive in the system and manufacturer, though for
the manufacturer you may just see (Standard disk drives).
Though, if you have a model number, such as ST31000528AS, you
can often deduce the manufacturer without even doing an online search on
the model number. E.g., Seagate starts model numbers with "ST", so I know
that the ST31000528AS and ST6000DX000-1H217Z are Seagate drives. And I
know the "WD" in "WD My Book 1230 USB Device" means the drive is a
Western Digital external disk drive.
You can also obtain the capacity of each drive in bytes by using the
size parameter.
c:\>wmic diskdrive get model, size
Model Size
ST31000528AS 1000202273280
ST6000DX000-1H217Z 6001172513280
Generic- Multi-Card USB Device
WD My Book 1230 USB Device 4000710389760
c:\>
So the ST31000528AS drive is 4000710389760 byte / 1,000 byte/kilobyte
/ 1,000 kilobyte/megabyte / 1,000 megabyte/gigabyte / 1,000 gigabyte/terrabyte
= 4 TB using the 1,000 number used by manufacturers rather than the
1,024 byte/kilobyte, etc. number often used in computing. E.g., see
the Wikipedia article on
Gigabyte.
If you want to see the list of other drive parameters you can check,
use wmic diskdrive get /?.
c:\>wmic diskdrive get /?
Property get operations.
USAGE:
GET [<property list>] [<get switches>]
NOTE: <property list> ::= <property name> | <property name>, <property list>
The following properties are available:
Property Type Operation
======== ==== =========
Availability N/A N/A
BytesPerSector N/A N/A
Capabilities N/A N/A
CapabilityDescriptions N/A N/A
CompressionMethod N/A N/A
ConfigManagerErrorCode N/A N/A
ConfigManagerUserConfig N/A N/A
DefaultBlockSize N/A N/A
Description N/A N/A
DeviceID N/A N/A
ErrorCleared N/A N/A
ErrorDescription N/A N/A
ErrorMethodology N/A N/A
Index N/A N/A
InstallDate N/A N/A
InterfaceType N/A N/A
LastErrorCode N/A N/A
Manufacturer N/A N/A
MaxBlockSize N/A N/A
MaxMediaSize N/A N/A
MediaLoaded N/A N/A
MediaType N/A N/A
MinBlockSize N/A N/A
Model N/A N/A
Name N/A N/A
NeedsCleaning N/A N/A
NumberOfMediaSupported N/A N/A
PNPDeviceID N/A N/A
Partitions N/A N/A
PowerManagementCapabilities N/A N/A
PowerManagementSupported N/A N/A
SCSIBus N/A N/A
SCSILogicalUnit N/A N/A
SCSIPort N/A N/A
SCSITargetId N/A N/A
SectorsPerTrack N/A N/A
Signature N/A N/A
Size N/A N/A
Status N/A N/A
StatusInfo N/A N/A
SystemName N/A N/A
TotalCylinders N/A N/A
TotalHeads N/A N/A
TotalSectors N/A N/A
TotalTracks N/A N/A
TracksPerCylinder N/A N/A
The following GET switches are available:
/VALUE - Return value.
/ALL(default) - Return the data and metadata for the attribute.
/TRANSLATE:<table name> - Translate output via values from <table name>.
/EVERY:<interval> [/REPEAT:<repeat count>] - Returns value every (X interval) se
conds, If /REPEAT specified the command is executed <repeat count> times.
/FORMAT:<format specifier> - Keyword/XSL filename to process the XML results.
NOTE: Order of /TRANSLATE and /FORMAT switches influences the appearance of outp
ut.
Case1: If /TRANSLATE precedes /FORMAT, then translation of results will be follo
wed by formatting.
Case2: If /TRANSLATE succeeds /FORMAT, then translation of the formatted results
will be done.
The hardware requirements Microsoft lists for various versions of its
operating systems has remained the same for processor speed and memory
from Windows Vista through Windows 7, 8, and 8.1. Microsoft recommends
a 1 GHz or faster Central Processing Unit (CPU) and 1 gigabyte (GB) of system
memory. And from Windows 7 through Windows 8.1 the amount of available
hard drive space recommended has been 16 GB available hard disk space for
the 32-bit version or or 20 GB for the 64-bit version.
