Movie Maker - saving collections

When adding pics or clips to your "collection" is it
recommended to save copies of the chosen clips in a new
folder?

I've recently used pictures from a folder that were later
moved to another folder. When I went back to watch the
movie the pictures added to the collection were gone as
the program didn't recognize the new path to find
them.....

What is the best way to properly backup your work?

There are 3 aspects to backing up your Movie Maker work.

1 - Source files (music, images, video clips) need to be someplace on your
hard drive(s) when you open a MM collection or project. If you move or
rename them, you can right-mouse click the icon in MM and re-establish the
links. They are not really imported into Movie Maker, so you have to
consider backing them up separately from the Movie Maker collection database
and project files.

2 - Movie Maker automatically saves the currently open collections file at a
fixed time interval. The default is 10 minutes, which you can change to
between 1 and 60 minutes via the menu Tools Options Auto Recover time
interval. The collections file is a database of information about
collections, the clips in them, and the associated source files. The
collection file, Mediatab.dat, should be backed up regularly. If you
accidentally remove a clip or collection, or the collection file becomes
corrupt, use the backup copy to restore it. The collections file is
typically located in the hidden folder C: \Documents and
Settings\UserAccountName\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Movie
Maker. A different collections file is created for each user (file names
would then be Mediatab0.dat, Mediatab1.dat, etc). To see the Local Settings
folder and its contents, you must have the Show hidden files and folders
setting option selected.

3 - The project files are individual MSWMM files and should be backed up as
you do your other important computer files. Once created, you can change the
name of the project file; they don't need to have a MSWMM extension. I
named one www.microsoft.com once and it still worked. Like the collection
file, there is an automatic backup process that Movie Maker uses, but it is
only to help in the event of a power failure or something like that (maybe a
MM2 freeze like I experienced tonight when conducting a workshop - we picked
up OK with minimal loss because of the automatic saving, but don't rely on
it for a backup process).

Note - if you totally lost your collection database, you could still open
and work with your project files. Once the clips are copied from the
collection contents pane and go into the project file, the information in
them is maintained separately.


PapaJohn


"LRW" wrote in message
...
When adding pics or clips to your "collection" is it
recommended to save copies of the chosen clips in a new
folder?

I've recently used pictures from a folder that were later
moved to another folder. When I went back to watch the
movie the pictures added to the collection were gone as
the program didn't recognize the new path to find
them.....

What is the best way to properly backup your work?