Alligator Kitteh

This one is difficult to believe:

Windows 7 – I Spoke Too Fast – Call the Exterminator

On my first attempt to use Windows 7 backup, it failed, and I received an error message for which the Microsoft support page offered the following helpful tidbit:

If the reparse point points to a location that contains any compressed file format (multimedia files, .zip files, and so on), you receive an error message that resembles the following:

0x81000037: Windows Backup failed while trying to read from the shadow copy on one of the volumes being backed up

To work around this problem, remove this reparse point from the library, and then run the backup wizard again. To back up content for this reparse point, select the absolute path of this location from the Windows Backup configuration user interface.

Huh?!?!?!?!  What in the world is a reparse point?  (Microsoft wasn’t so helpful in explaining this.)

I eventually found that I could get rid of the error by deleting all of my old system restore points.  (Gee, who would want to keep those?)

My next backup attempt yielded a similarly cryptic error message, and again, the Microsoft Support site had nothing useful to say.  Eventually I identified the problem to be my addition of a folder at the same hierarchy as My Documents and My Videos.

For as much as Microsoft charges for Windows 7, I would expect comprehensible error messages and useful info on their support pages.